What did you do in the hols? - We talked

"Your summer conversation will be fairly lengthy and convoluted", Justice Committee convener Bill Aitken remarked to Fergus Ewing, the Government minister in charge of the Legal Services (Scotland) Bill, towards the end of the committee's stage 2 consideration of the bill.

Not that there appear to be any insuperable obstacles. The Society appears to have achieved its principal objectives with the amendments passed to date: the role of the Lord President has been upgraded from consultation to consent in key provisions relevant to professional independence; Council's current policy to cap external investment in a legal practice at 49% has been written into the bill (but so has the Government's power to bring forward an order to vary or remove the limit); regulation of will writers, as supported it seems by pretty well the whole profession, is now there also; and the controversial s 92 no longer enables the Government even to set any criteria for non-lawyer Council members (though there is now provision for direct appointment of lay members to the new regulation committee if the Council does not have enough lay members to fill the necessary places).

Any or all of these could still be revisited at stage 3, of course, if MSPs were minded to push for further amendments, so we may not yet have seen the last of the arguments that divided the profession in recent months.

That apart, there is enough work still to be done. On the Guarantee Fund, for example, the Society has so far failed in its objective of having it provided that claims can only derive from firms it regulates, though talks are to continue on whether it can have some supervisory role in other cases. And the Government has agreed a £1.25m cap on individual claims, but not yet to a global limit on claims in any one year. (Admittedly it is difficult to avoid such a limit working in a potentially arbitrary fashion.)

Then a number of amendments were put forward which the Government resisted on the basis that they were more than just technical and it was not satisfied that there had been sufficient consultation. One would have conferred power on Council to make grants or loans to claimants on the Guarantee Fund. Another would give power to charge subscription fees on an entity rather than an individual basis; and a third, power to levy charges for specific services.

The minister also needed to be persuaded of the case for a power to suspend a practising certificate following certain convictions, or the making of a company director disqualification order, without having to apply to the Discipline Tribunal, as well as other amendments to the powers to bring a complaint.

No doubt there is more on the agenda; as I commented before, it has been hard to keep track of all the amendments and which matters are likely for further discussion.

Reading the official report, it is not even clear whether the minister had the same understanding of the effect of the some of the amendments as the proposing member (usually Mr Aitken), so it is hard to tell whether or not they would be likely to make any radical or unexpected changes. Perhaps that contributed to Mr Aitken voicing his regret at one point that more of the outstanding matters had not been settled by the time of the stage 2 sittings.

Compared with the issues that dominated the attention before the committee began sitting, none of them are likely to alter the future course of the profession, but it is still desirable to get them right, and we have seen before the danger of attempting to overload the chamber with amendments at stage 3. Let us hope that the talks succeed in clearing the air and that the Parliament is presented with a coherent set of proposals come the final debate.