Linda Lee - Council Members Report: June 2023

I will be retiring as the Law Society Council Member for Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Rutland in October of this year after 20 years’ service.

Congratulations to Steven James Mather who will be taking over the seat. I hope you are all as kind and supportive to him as you have been to me over the years.

50+ Years on the Roll of Solicitors

One of the less well publicised jobs of the President of the Law Society of England and Wales was to receive a list each month of all the solicitors who that month had been on the Roll for 40, 50 or 60 years. As President, I then had to painstakingly copy their names onto the relevant certificate and then sign it. It could be a chore, particularly the month when I handed in the completed batch only to be told that all those who had qualified in in 1960 were mistakenly identified to me as those who had been qualified for 60 years and those who qualified in 1950 as those who required a certificate for 50 years. The certificates all had to be done again! Although it did take many hours each month, it was a lovely task as some of those who were delighted to be remembered many years after they had retired would write to me and tell me about their lives and careers.

It seems that the process is no longer one researched by the Law Society and if you have been on the Roll (or know of someone who has) for those periods of time, you must now make an application to the Law Society. The relevant person to contact is Sophie Peterson (Sophie. peterson@lawsociety.org.uk). Simply give her the name and year of qualification a(nd Roll number if you can find it on the Find a Solicitor website). Please do make the effort to do so, it is important that these milestones are marked.

Volunteering -the Solictors’ Assistance Scheme SAS-employment law

In very broad terms, only 1 in 6 of those applying to university to study law will go on to be solicitors. The chance of practising as a barrister is even more remote as only 1 in 15 will get pupillage and only 1 in 110 will get a tenancy less than six months after they completed pupillage.i The odds are presumably even higher for those of us who come from non-traditional backgrounds.

Whatever troubles and dissatisfaction we have faced in life, we have succeeded in achieving our career goals. So how should we celebrate?

The most obvious way is to use our professional skills to volunteer either to give something back to society or to the profession itself.

One of my volunteer roles is to work with the SAS as a panel member giving advice and as its Chair. I have had a lot of fun with that name over the years, implying that I might at any moment spring through a window with a grenade between my teeth. In fact, SAS stands for the Solicitors Assistance Scheme.

The SAS was formed over fifty years ago. We are a small group of volunteers who aim to serve and support the profession they are proud to be part of. Each volunteer has to demonstrate their experience and expertise in the relevant field in order to become panel members of the scheme. They are all in private practice and are giving their time freely with no expectation of reward.

We recognise that it can be extremely stressful to face issues that arise during practice as a solicitor and that practitioners will often not know where to turn or where they can seek advice and speak freely to somebody with relevant knowledge and experience, who will listen and understand and give a pointer in the right direction. Early advice can often provide a solution or prevent a potentially difficult situation becoming worse.

The objective of the scheme is to be an informed friend in need, and to provide objective initial guidance to assist the solicitor to understand the options and the best way forward. The scheme guarantees one-hour’s free advice.

It is important to have confidence in the fact that scheme members are expert in their fields and can confidently advise in respect of concerns that you have whether that be an SRA investigation, an employment problem (as an employee or as an employer), a partnership/member dispute, or a fraud matter. The scheme members are experienced in dealing with the relevant area of law. If the particular scheme member cannot for any reason assist, they will signpost to another member or another support service, such as LawCare and the Solicitors’ Charity who we work closely with.

As an organisation, we are at a crossroads, we are now in a position where we will be unable to offer advice in employment law from the autumn as we lack sufficient volunteers to continue to provide this service.

Many of our employment law calls come from trainee and junior solicitors and their problems can often be resolved within the one free hour’s advice offered.

If you are an experienced employment lawyer, please consider applying to join our scheme. We will be circulating a reminder and a copy of the application form several times over the coming months.

Details of the scheme and the application form can be found here: https://www.thesas.org.uk/members

Or please do contact me if you would like to discuss becoming a panel member.

Remember, “It’s easy to make a buck. It’s a lot tougher to make a difference.” ii

Linda Lee has been Council Member for Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Rutland since 2003. She is a past President of the Law Society of England and Wales and is the current Chair of the Professional Indemnity Insurance Committee and a member of the Policy and Regulatory Affairs Committee, the Regulatory Processes Committee and Access to Justice Committee. She is current Chair of the Solicitors Assistance Scheme. Linda is an experienced litigation solicitor and is a Consultant at Weightmans, where she specialises in solicitors’ disciplinary, compliance and regulatory work. She can be contacted by email at: lindakhlee@aol.com i Very roughly calculated from statistics collated by the Bar Standards Board, the Law Society and the Bar Standards Board https://www.barstandardsboard. org.uk/news-publications/research-andstatistics/statistics-about-the-bar/ call-to-the-bar-and-tenancy.html, https:// www.lawsociety.org.uk/career-advice/ becoming-a-solicitor/entry-trends, https://www.sra.org.uk/sra/researchpublications/regulated-communitystatistics/data/routes_admission ii attributed to Tom Brokaw of NBC News.