Tag Results

Plans by the Bar Standards Board to scrap its ‘list of defaulting solicitors’ have been approved by the Legal Services Board. Richard Moriarty, chief executive of the LSB, said the list could undermine the independence of the BSB.

‘The cab-rank rule is dead, long live the cab-rank principle’, or words to that effect, may be heard before too long. More than two years after the prescriptive-rule-versus-laudable-principle debate was sparked, the Bar Standards Board appears ready to consider converting the rule and its many exceptions into an outcomes-focused foundation of barristers’ practice.

The Law Society has responded to a Bar Standards Board call for evidence on the cab-rank rule by questioning its “operational value”. A survey of solicitors who regularly use barristers found that only one person had actually invoked the rule.

The Bar Standards Board (BSB) is investigating the extent to which barristers have been accepting work from solicitors without entering into contracts, or accepting terms “contrary to their regulatory obligations”.

The Bar Standards Board has moved to close a “regulatory anomaly” that would have temporarily seen barristers forced to accept the controversial new legal aid rates set by the government for very high-cost cases (VHCCs).