Marsh to join SRA board
Conveyancing expert questions whether consumers prefer big organisations
Paul Marsh, former president of the Law Society and one of the most experienced conveyancers in the country, is to join the board of the SRA in January.
Marsh will be one of four new recruits, the others all being lay members, as the board moves to having a lay majority for the first time.
He said the priority for the SRA should be to 'have in place a regulatory regime that protects consumers but enables solicitors to do conveyancing at a price acceptable to consumers'.
Marsh said the regime should also allow solicitors to compete with other suppliers such as licensed conveyancers.
'In the average market town, a lot of estate agents are small and independent and enjoy working with small, independent solicitors. It's hard for the conveyancing factories to beat that.'
Marsh said the arrival of ABSs marked a 'whole new dawn' for legal services.
'We have to provide legal services in the form the public want it supplied. If they want it supplied through big organisations, then that is what they want.
'We are seeing an awful lot of PR from people saying that, but is it what they want?'
The three new lay members of the SRA's board in January 2013 will be Peter Phippen, a former managing director of BBC magazines, Bill Galvin, the chief executive of the Pensions Regulator, and Enid Rowlands, the chair of Victim Support.
Six board members are retiring next month. The solicitor members are Mark Humphries, Lucy Winskell and Lorrette Law and the non-solicitor members Dr Susan Bews, Sir Ron Watson and Ian Menzies-Conacher.
Two new members will arrive in January 2014. They are Julia Black, a lay member but also a professor in the department of law at the LSE, and Chris Randall, solicitor and chief executive of Sussex firm Mayo Wynne Baxter.