The Legal and Education Training Review is a ‘missed opportunity’ because it fails to heed calls for a re-accreditation scheme for solicitors, the legal consumer watchdog said today.

Elisabeth Davies, chair of the Legal Services Consumer Panel, criticised the report for not redesigning the system around the needs of clients.

Davies said consumers already assume that solicitors are revalidated and suggested ‘protectionism’ in the profession was prevalent in its omission from the LETR.

‘Introducing periodic re-accreditation in high-risk areas of law is the single biggest thing the review could have done to bolster consumer confidence in the quality of legal work, so we're greatly disappointed this is missing from the proposals,’ she said.

‘After a long fight re-accreditation was introduced in medicine to benefit patients, but sadly it's been rejected in law because surveys of practitioners show they don't want it.’

Davies praised elements of the report calling for more training in ethics and client-care skills, a revamp of CPD and more robust voluntary quality schemes.

She described the LETR as ‘an important staging post’ in an ongoing process to reform education and training to be suitable for the modern market.

But she emphasised that lawyers need to permanently alter their attitude towards training end education after they have qualified to practise.

Davies said her experience as part of the LETR reference group left her with the feeling that lawyers ‘don’t fully buy in to the need for change’.

‘It seems to me that the majority of solicitors and barristers are not championing reform,’ she added. ‘There was noticeable irritation at the very notion of the word consumer, concerns that the profession will become more regulated, and I sensed concerns that change would lead to unwelcome scrutiny and transparency.’