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Law firms will be able to check the diversity data of similar practices from next month, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has said. This will give them confidence to improve their own diversity, the head of its equality committee said.

The introduction of relationship management – giving certain law firms a dedicated contact at the Solicitors Regulation Authority – is working for both sides, new research has indicated. However, a fifth of firms consider complying with OFR is too expensive.

The move by the Solicitors Regulation Authority to embrace entity-based and outcomes-focused regulation is hard to understand, major new research commissioned by the Legal Services Board and Law Society has claimed.

A number of positives are revealed in a recent survey conducted by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Most notably, a year after the implementation of outcomes-focused regulation (OFR) and perhaps understandably, firms’ attitudes are shifting towards greater levels of acceptance as they increase their experience of working with the new regime of regulation. Measuring the impact of OFR on firms, released last week, found that 50% of respondents felt ‘favourable’ about OFR, a welcome increase on the previous year’s 36%. However, that still leaves the other 50% to be convinced.

An outcomes-focused, risk-based approach to regulating the activities of most lawyers who deliver legal services in a post-Legal Services Act landscape is a fact of life. Yet you still don’t have to go far to find solicitors who either fail to grasp the concept or hanker after the old, detailed rules-based system. The degree of non-acceptance is profound, more than a year after outcomes-focused regulation came in – in October 2011. So persistent is it that the SRA may be relying on the insertion of compliance officers for legal practice and financial administration (COLPs and COFAs) into the fabric of every firm to help change attitudes.