Future Rights for Legal Executive Lawyers

ILEX has applied for the right to grant members independent rights to conduct civil litigation and provide probate services (currently such rights have to be exercised under the supervision of a solicitor), and has also applied for independent rights to conduct conveyancing and conduct criminal litigation.

Combined these will essentially give legal executives all the rights they need to practise on their own. As it is, several legal executives already run their own businesses, but are not permitted to provide these so-called reserved services.

As well as empowering legal executives, being able to grant these rights will allow ILEX's independent regulatory arm – ILEX Professional Standards (IPS) – to regulate the final stage of the Legal Services Act revolution: alternative business structures (ABSs). Due to come in from October 2011, these represent a radical relaxation of the ownership restrictions around law firms and will allow non-lawyers to invest in or own law firms. Already major brand names such as the Co-op and the AA have signalled their intention to start offering legal services to the general public once allowed.

Big Bang

The impact this will have on traditional law firms is impossible to predict, but is thought likely to reduce their number. It is even harder to predict what it will mean for the lawyers – will their number also go down as big businesses reduce the number of qualified people and replace them with so-called paralegals operating clever computers, or will actually they just end up working in a far wider range of different legal environments?

Co-operative Legal Services is one of the largest employers of legal executives in the country, with 38 Fellows, members and students currently among the 139 staff handling legal work (and 288 staff in total) it has built up since being established in August 2006. Its growth has been startling – in 2009, it recorded turnover of £20 million, an increase of nearly 50% on the year before, with profits more than doubled to £3.8 million. It has focused on process-driven work such as personal injury and wills and probate, the latter linking logically to the Co-op's big funerals business.

Co-operative Legal Services has made clear its intention to become one of the first, if not the very first, ABS. Speaking at March's ILEX National Conference, its managing director Eddie Ryan told delegates that once it is an ABS, 'we will make much more of a bang in the market, especially for the 15 million people walking through our stores every week'. He added that Co-op Legal Services was 'effectively' an ABS already, offering a range of legal services to Co-op members (in the same way that the AA already does). 'Yes, we are a threat,' he said. '[But] are we going to try and wipe out small firms? No.'

This coming together of the eight branches of the legal profession – legal executives, solicitors, barristers, licensed conveyancers, trade mark attorneys, patent agents, notaries and costs lawyers – and the involvement of non-lawyers has also breathed life into one of the oldest debates of all: fusion. This is shorthand for whether the distinctions between the eight should fall away and everyone should be a 'lawyer'.

At the ILEX conference, IPS board member Nick Smedley asked whether ABSs hastened the blurring of the different legal professions and, in time, the end of regulators and professional bodies for each of them. Chris Kenny, chief executive of the oversight regulator the Legal Services Board, replied that this highlighted trends that are increasingly happening – 'there are 'different routes to competence, rather than one golden route' – and he predicted that ABSs will accelerate them. As a result, the question of fusion 'will become more live'.

Mobile Lawyers

So in this brave new and, in all likelihood, much more meritocratic legal world, just who are legal executives? Last year ILEX released the findings of a membership survey which provide a fascinating insight into the make-up of the profession. Some 832 members responded to the survey, which found that the parents of 82% of them had not gone to university. A third of respondents had been legal secretaries before studying to become a legal executive, with others holding jobs such as paralegal and more general secretarial roles. Nearly 12% were school leavers.

This is all particularly significant as there are currently various initiatives afoot to improve social mobility within the professions generally, including law, to move away from the 'pale, stale and male' stereotype. ILEX remains the only way to become a lawyer without a degree.

Encouragement from their employer/colleagues was a factor in deciding to undertake the ILEX studies for nearly half of respondents, while financial support from their employer also figured strongly (44%). Other factors included being unable to afford to study full-time at university (36%) and seeing ILEX as the quickest route to qualifying as a lawyer (26%).

Nearly three-quarters of respondents were employed full-time, with another 13% part-time and 3.6% self-employed. A third worked in solicitors' firms of one to five partners, 17% in firms of six to 12 partners, and 15% in larger practices. Non-legal organisations (8.2%), local authorities (8%), limited liability partnerships (4.4%), commercial companies (4.1%) and government departments (2.7%) also featured.

Of those working in the legal sector, most (57%) were fee-earners, and the rest in the main legal secretaries, managing other legal work or handling non-legal work. Some 35% reported having management/supervisory responsibilities. Conveyancing was the most common practice area (31%), followed by personal injury (18%), probate/wills (16%), family (16%) general litigation (12%) and debt recovery (11%), with commercial, employment, housing and criminal defence rounding out that top ten.

The diversity of legal executives is also notable, with the make-up of the legal profession and the judiciary in particular an issue that has been much in the spotlight in recent years. Some 13.7% of respondents were from a non-white background and three-quarters of ILEX members are women – both far higher than the equivalent figures for solicitors and barristers.

But with the variety of backgrounds of legal executives can come barriers to progressing your career, at least in a traditional profession like the law, with some respondents feeling they had experienced barriers, with educational background the most commonly cited reason. But equally attitudes are changing as legal executives and ILEX become ever more prominent, with nearly two-thirds now believing that legal executives are recognised as fully fledged lawyers by colleagues and clients.

The reality is that legal executives have come a long way since ILEX was formed in 1963. For many years they were seen as clerks who supported solicitors, but now they stand shoulder to shoulder with their solicitor colleagues, doing the same work and winning the same recognition. They can become partners and judges. Soon they will be able to set up their own law firms. Their time has undoubtedly come.

This article first appeared in the Legal Executive Journal's 2010 Student Supplement.