System of lawyers regulating lawyers looks unlikely to end with Rogerton report

David Buchanan-cook’s (Head of Oversight at the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission) commemoration of the commission’s tenth birthday was a very informative insight into an important aspect of Scotland’s legal landscape: how Scotland’s solicitors, advocates and QCS are regulated (Your report, Law and Legal Affairs, 29 October).

The SLCC is the product of a messy compromise by Scotland’s politicians in response to growing pressure from the laity regarding the bias that inheres in how the Law Society of Scotland and the Faculty of Advocates ‘regulate’ the conduct of their members.

The ‘compromise’ meant that the society and the faculty would retain control over ‘conduct’ complaints and the SLCC would deal with nonconduct complaints – thereby leaving those who submitted conduct complaints facing the same problem that preceded the compromise: lawyers regulating lawyers. Furthermore, making a distinction between conduct and non-conduct complaints was an almost impossible task.

Mr Buchanan-cook alluded to the problems created by the ‘compromise’:

“For a number of years, we have been consistently saying that the system we were given to process complaints – contained in primary legislation, and therefore immobile – was not fit for purpose. Its inherent complexity makes it unfathomable to complainers and lawyers alike. Our new Chair famously described it as ‘bonkers’ – and he’s not wrong.”

Arguably, ‘bonkers’ is how the society and the faculty like it. Leaving conduct complaints under their control enhanced the prospect of total exoneration for those solicitors, advocates and QCS whose conduct was, from the perspective of their clients, appalling. Mr Buchanan-cook is encouraged by the prospect of a ‘new, single body’ (excluding the society and the faculty) to investigate complaints – thanks to the recommendations in the recent report by Esther Rogerton on the future of legal regulation in Scotland.

Perhaps he should restrain his optimism. The Rogerton recommendations, (a godsend for the laity), have already stirred a hostile reaction from the Law Society and the cunning lobbying by the society and the Faculty of Advocates that persuaded our timid politicians to create the quagmire compromise, will be rapidly redeployed to ensure that the Rogerton recommendations, with the assistance of our accommodating politicians, are ultimately reduced to rubble.

THOMAS CROOKS Dundas Street, Edinburgh