Evolve

We evolve to maintain our financial sustainability and support a recovering legal services sector.

• Our membership options evolve to include those supporting Scottish solicitors and the legal sector.
• Our activity and services are more accessible, rebuilt on the latest technology to remove geographical and physical barriers.
• Our commercial operations recover to take pressure off core fees and help replenish reserves.

If ever there was a period which required the Law Society to change, it is now.

Our platinum anniversary year in 2019 was a moment for us to celebrate all that the solicitor profession has achieved over the last 70 years. It also allowed us to reflect on the huge change seen since the Law Society was formed in 1949.

Today’s legal profession is larger and more diverse than ever before, both in its make-up and its work. Consumer expectations are fundamentally changing the way legal firms do business. Social attitudes are evolving. Technology continues to change the way we live, personally and professionally.

Change is not just something we tolerate; it is something we actively and positively embrace.

It is why we have begun to open our membership to non-solicitor legal professionals. Our approach to equality and diversity is recognised by other jurisdictions as ground-breaking. It was our case for change proposals in 2015 that acted as the catalyst for the Scottish Government legal services review and set foundations for the reform to come.

COVID 19, and the social and economic impact which has followed, means we must change our thinking once more. It will require us to accelerate reform, both in what we do and how we do it. However, we are also realistic about the nature of the economic downturn and why it means our earlier plan to grow needs to evolve into a plan to sustain and recover, at least for the next two years.

As the legal sector evolves, so too must our attitude and approach to the new and evolving roles within that sector. We have worked hard to create new and enhance existing voluntary memberships for paralegals and legal technicians. Our student associate membership and Law Society fellow scheme reflects our desire to have a strong and lasting relationship with those about to embark on a legal career and those who are concluding it.

We want to quicken an expansion of this family of memberships. The period ahead could see the creation of more innovative roles. It will also require existing traditional roles to adapt and change. It is important for the Law Society to be there, setting standards and servicing needs in all parts of the sector.

That activity, whether for solicitors or nonsolicitor members, needs to be flexible and innovative. We will use technology, not just in the delivery of these services but also in our outreach, so we can engage with all parts of the profession.

This commitment to evolve will drive changes in our regulatory work too. We will continue to push hard for the statutory reforms which are so urgently needed to improve the regulatory system, both for consumers and solicitors. However, we recognise that COVID 19 and other competing political priorities mean new legislation could still be some time away. It means we must strive to innovate and find ways of evolving our approach within the existing statutory framework.

All of this will be underpinned by an achievable and sustainable financial plan. Our ongoing focus on commercial income will not be a case of making money for the sake of it. It is about having the resources needed to sustain the breadth of work we do, which the public depend on and which our members value. Sustaining this noncore revenue means we can continue to keep the cost of practice as low as feasibly possible through carefully controlled core membership fees. Given the need for recovery in the profession, we know this focus will be more important than ever.

Looking at our own resilience and sustainability, we also need to use revenue to replenish the reserves we chose to use to provide immediate financial support to the profession. It is vital that the Law Society remains on a sound and solid financial footing, now and in the longterm. Therefore each time a member of the profession or wider legal sector chooses a Law Society event, course or service over that of another provider, they are helping us ensure we are there to help again in the future if it is ever needed.