Society warns of 'lawsuits against regulators' over QASA

The Law Society has warned that the introduction of QASA, due to be implemented in phases from January next year, could lead disappointed criminal advocates to bring 'lawsuits against their regulators'.

In its response to the final consultation on the quality assurance scheme, the society said the number of advocates per circuit should have been mapped to the number of trials conducted by judges trained in evaluation.

'Only by undertaking this exercise can a properly extrapolated figure of the number of trials to be used for evaluation by an applicant be arrived at and over what period.

'Instead, a random number of cases over a randomly chosen period has been arrived at. This is a highly dangerous approach that may one day come to be seen as irrational in law if applicants, unable through no fault of their own to comply with a wholly contrived number of trials to be done over a certain period, start to present themselves in lawsuits against their regulators.'

Chancery Lane said it would 'strongly urge the SRA to reconsider the time limit and to allow a longer period as suggested above for advocates to be assessed or to obtain judicial evaluations.'

Among its other 'substantial concerns' Chancery Lane said there was no definite information on the cost of accreditation.

'It is frankly astonishing that regulators can develop a scheme with no consultation on the likely costs or an assessment of how these relate to the benefits that are likely to be achieved, and cannot, within six months of the likely implementation of the scheme indicate what the costs will be.

'The effect of QASA will be to annul the historic rights of the majority of solicitors to appear before the magistrates' court, as only those who appear regularly will want to be reaccredited after the first five years of the scheme.

'This is a change of great significance to the profession and which may well have implications for access to justice.

'In the society's view it is a question that needs to be the subject of significantly wider consultation and to be considered in the context of ideas about activity-based regulation and the Legal Education and Training Review. We doubt that it is a proportionate response to any problems that exist.'