Legal Services Board

The Legal Services Board is an independent body responsible for overseeing the regulation of lawyers in England and Wales. It is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Ministry of Justice, created through the Legal Services Act of 2007 (LSA 2007).

The Legal Services Board is politically and financially independent of the government. Costs are covered entirely by a levy on the approved regulators of the legal professions. Its overriding mandate is to ensure that regulation in the legal services sector is carried out in the public interest and that the interests of consumers are placed at the heart of the system.

The Board came into being on 1 January 2009 and became fully operational on 1 January 2010.

The Legal Services Board is an oversight regulator, and sits at the top of the regulatory system for legal services in England and Wales. It provides regulatory oversight of the eight ‘’approved regulators’’ named in the Legal Services Act of 2007 (LSA 2007), and two additional regulators added since the act gained Royal Assent.

The Act outlines the general functions of the Board, which include: a duty to promote the regulatory objectives (and act in a way which it considers most appropriate for the purpose of meeting those objectives); to assist the regulators in the maintenance and development of standards of regulation, education and training of authorised persons; to have regard to good corporate governance practice in its affairs; and to prepare an annual report detailing the discharge of its functions in the previous financial year and its performance in line with the regulatory objectives.

It also oversees the Office for Legal Complaints (the body responsible for administering the Legal Ombudsman scheme), and makes recommendations to amend the list of reserved legal activities.

Regulation of the legal profession is the responsibility of the approved regulators (ARs). The LSB is responsible for overseeing the approved regulators and to ensure that regulation is conducted in adherence to the regulatory objectives, which it does through assessment against a regulatory performance framework. The LSB is responsible for ensuring that the approved regulators’ representative and regulatory functions are sufficiently independent from one another.

It does this by establishing Internal Governance Rules (IGR), which dictate how regulators’ independent regulatory arms are kept independent.