Chair's Board Update April 2025

The minutes of our April meeting will be published on our website in the usual way, but in the meantime highlights of the meeting included:

• Performance: the Board discussed last month’s Regulatory Performance assessment by the LSB. We were pleased to see the LSB’s recognition of improvements in several areas, including transparency of decision-making, better resourcing stability and our approach to risk, but agreed that further improvement is still needed. We will consider an action plan to address key priorities next month.
• Governance: we conducted an annual review of our Risk Appetite Statement and agreed on some minor revisions. We also noted that the recruitment for a new lay Board Member had begun with the hope of an appointment later this Summer. Finally, we agreed to commission an external evaluation of the Board’s effectiveness later this year in line with corporate good practice.
• Education: we had a full debate of the changing education and training landscape, and agreed we should continue to support plans to increase provision where possible, to promote the benefits of the CILEX route, and to make our processes user-friendly whilst not undermining their rigor. In this context we noted the consultation underway to gauge interest in stand-alone litigation practice rights and will return to this in our July meeting. We also agreed to update fees paid to assessors and charged to applicants for a range of specialist applications.
• Growth: we had a good debate on how best we can contribute to the growth agenda. We agreed that it was important that we controlled the costs we ( and the LSB) impose on firms, to look again at the PII market to see if we could help, and to continue to move to a more strongly risk based system of regulation: a theme which had also strongly emerged from the roundtable event we hosted in February on the unregulated legal sector.

Our next planned Board catch-up is on 15/16 May 2025 with our annual in-person Strategy Session, our next full Board meeting will be held on 15 July 2025. As always if you want to know more, please access our website, read our Board papers or contact us.