Alternative Business Structures and Licensed Bodies
Before the coming into force of the Act, lawyers in England and Wales could only practice as:
- Solicitors, as sole traders or in partnerships with other solicitors;
- Barristers, as sole traders; or
- Employees providing legal services to their employer.
The Act allows alternative business structures (ABSs) with non-lawyers in professional, management or ownership roles. The Act creates a system whereby approved regulators can authorise licensed bodies to offer reserved legal services (ss.71-111).
As of March 2008, no date is fixed for the coming into force of these provisions and it has been suggested in the press that such structures are unlikely to be created until 2011 or 2012. Further, the extent to which the Bar Council will permit barristers to become involved in the full range of such structures is, as of March 2008, still unclear.
Read more about this topic: Legal Services Act 2007
Famous quotes containing the words alternative, business, structures and/or bodies:
“If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
“... hurled religiously
Upon your business of humility
Into the iron forestries of hell....”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“Remember all those renowned generations,
They left their bodies to fatten the wolves,
They left their homesteads to fatten the foxes,
Fled to far countries, or sheltered themselves
In cavern, crevice or hole,
Defending Ireland’s soul.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)