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Four criminal law barristers have appealed to the Supreme Court in their judicial review of the Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates (QASA) – despite a costs bill which already totals £215,000, Legal Futures can reveal.

An increasing tendency among solicitors to pay referral fees to each other and to use solicitor-advocates is diverting work away from junior barristers, ultimately threatening the quality of the judiciary, according to the Bar Council.

The new Lord Chancellor has said he is “sympathetic” with the notion that the legal profession is over-regulated, the chairman of the Bar Council has claimed as he stepped up his call for the Legal Services Board to be scrapped.

The recent debate on the Bar Standards Board’s (BSB) plans to regulate advocacy-focused business structures – entities – pitted Bar Council old-timers against BSB modernists, and it was the latter who came out on top. The motion was bland enough but it soon became clear that what its proposers actually meant by this was “entities will open the door to solicitors flooding (and eventually taking over) the Bar’s institutions and that by inviting solicitor-advocates into its regulatory ‘tent’, the BSB will weaken the distinctiveness of the barristers’ offering”.

The Legal Services Board yesterday rejected a bid to allow licensed conveyancers to conduct litigation and advocacy, after more than a year of consideration. It had run into fierce opposition from the Lord Chief Justice and the Law Society.