THE legal system that developed in Britain over many centuries created a model that was adopted widely throughout what are now the 53 countries of the Commonwealth. The way legal services are delivered in England and Wales, and the way lawyers are educated, are both now being redesigned. Many Commonwealth practitioners and politicians will therefore be keeping a careful watch on developments.

If other Commonwealth countries adopt similar changes, the impact on people’s lives across the world could be considerable. The Commonwealth’s 1.7 billion people account for a third of the world’s population, and their citizenship hinges on how they are offered legal services.

Two blueprints for legal change are generating much animated debate. They are Sir David Clementi’s Review of the Regulatory Framework for Legal Services in England and Wales, and the Law Society of England and Wales’s consultation paper Qualifying as a Solicitor — a Framework for the Future. The future panorama of legal activity projected by these plans triggers recall of the dictum that not all change is progress, and, as the historian E. H. Carr noted in 1961, progress does not “advance in an unbroken straight line without reverses and deviations”.

Both sets of documented proposals contain detailed and diverse suggestions, but a principle that they share is one of deregulation. In both pictures of the future, ordinary business decision-making will prevail where traditionally avowed professional ethics enjoyed dominion.

One controversial proposal in the Clementi report would, if implemented, allow direct capital investment by non-lawyers in businesses offering legal services to the public. The report notes that some objectors have argued that only lawyers should be “fit to own” a legal practice. It rejects such anxieties and notes that, although the “fit to own” test does pose problems, “the short answer is an insufficient one, just as the words ‘South Sea Bubble ’ would not have been a sufficient reason for our forefathers to have prevented all new public share offers”.

Additionally, it is recognised that owners should not be allowed to place their own commercial interests in conflict with the interests of the clients of their firm. The Bar Council of England and Wales observes that an owner of a law firm who was not a lawyer, and therefore not subject to professional duties, would be perfectly entitled to pursue his own financial interests, “even in circumstances where those conflicted with the best interests of clients of the firm or with other core values of the legal profession”. Sir David’s answer to this is that the firm would have a number of characteristics providing the proper safeguards. These would include that the head of legal practice must be a qualified lawyer. The danger that various confidential legal material relating to clients might pass through the professional membrane of a firm into the purview of the commercial owner of the firm is judged as preventable by rules restricting access to files.

The Law Society’s legal education proposals are based on what is called an “outcomes-based training” for solicitors. Under the new scheme, course providers, like universities and professional training colleges, would no longer be qualityassured and monitored by the Law Society. Thus, concerns with the general quality of legal education could be displaced by a more mechanical measurement of results.

The Law Society has stated that it needs “a more flexible framework that will allow people to study in ways that suit their circumstances”. Currently, there are, though, seven main pathways to becoming a solicitor, and every conceivable version of law course. There is a spectacular range of institutions offering such courses. There are objections that failing to protect the economic interests of new entrants to the profession by abolishing minimum salary requirememts would be retrograde. Against all this, it is argued that standards will remain high while the more flexible routes will remove what some see as the present discriminatory entry route with its need for students to take on five-figure debt. The standard of academic qualification is to be raised to honours degree level, whereas now an ordinary degree suffices. Universities and course providers will be given greater freedom, it is argued, to design courses.

It is true that, historically, the legal professions have been conservative, even when it has been against their own best interests. In the 1950s, Professor L.C.B. Gower, of London University, thought that because of such conservatism, “the lawyer is losing more and more work to the accountant and the banker”. In 1962 Anthony Sampson noted that the law “still likes to cling to its old authority and prestige, rather than to interest itself in the exciting new developments of society”. Change should be welcome and refreshing; but it is debatable whether either the proposed system of legal practice or the revamp of legal education will enjoy universal support in their current drafts. Even so, observers should resist the scepticism of Mr Justice Astbury’s old dictum: “Reform! Reform! Aren’t things bad enough already?”

The author is Professor of Law, and director of the Centre for Law, The Open University

• The Law School in the Commonwealth, Thursday, 9.30-11am

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