About the Bar Standards Board (Regulating Barristers)

The Bar Standards Board (BSB) regulates barristers and specialised legal services businesses in England and Wales in the public interest. We carry out a range of regulatory activities to promote the regulatory objectives of the Legal Services Act 2007.

As a risk-based regulator, we use data and intelligence to focus our attention as the regulator on the risks that we think pose the biggest threats to the public interest. We then act to try and prevent the threats that those risks pose from occurring or to reduce their impact.

LegalTech activities

The BSB established a dedicated technology & innovation policy workstream in our 2022-25 Strategic Plan, recognising technology as as a key lever to improve service quality and access at the Bar.

We are currently focused on a set of projects to gather evidence on how technology impacts the Bar and to improve access and quality of services at the Bar. These include:

• Tech at the Bar research study
• Digital Comparison Tool market study
• Unbundling tools pilot
• LawtechUK Regulatory Response Unit engagement with startups/tech developers
• BSB Data & Intelligence Strategy

Find us at the Hackathon

Henry Fingerhut, Technology and Innovation Policy Manager #judge #firstround

Theodore Smith, Technology and Innovation Senior Public Policy Officer

BSB Challenge

Background

The legal services sector is notoriously difficult for consumers to access and navigate. Depending on their legal need, consumers may access as many as nine types of legal professional, each operating under a separate regulatory structure with different requirements and regulatory protections available. Added on to this is the difficulty of comparing legal providers (e.g. on the scope of the service to be provided, quality, and price), the complexity of the law, procedure, and the court system they may face over the course of their matter, and their potential vulnerability at a time they are facing a personal legal issue. Consumers are often dissatisfied with their experience of legal services and unable to achieve satisfactory resolution.

Coupled with this consumer challenge, barristers, often face challenges in regularly adopting and using new technologies that could improve client outcomes. Our recently published Tech at the Bar research indicates the unique challenges barristers face in adopting new technologies. These barriers are primarily due to three factors:

• Barristers’ business model: barristers are mostly self-employed and share limited administrative services in cooperations known as ‘chambers’. Many technologies are adopted at the individual-level (rather than by chambers), and barristers often do not have the time to evaluate and experiment with new technologies
• The nature of barristers’ work: Barristers represent clients in court, and their advice work is often highly bespoke, so they may not benefit as much from automation technologies. Barristers have unpredictable schedules and often engage only indirectly with their client via referring solicitors.
• And limited supply of technologies to the Bar: Tech providers typically design and market technologies for the solicitor market, which is roughly 10x the size of the Bar and has seen greater benefit from common types of legal technologies (e.g. document automation) than the Bar