08
Honorary Secretary’s report Winter 2021 years because, as I’m sure you will know by now, she has been elected by her colleague council members to be the Deputy Vice President in the coming year which means that, barring accidents, she will be Vice President next year and the President of The Law Society in the following year 2022/2023. That will be a very proud moment for the SPG to know that The Law Society is so ably represented by one of their number. Her election was a clear mandate by her fellow council members on the basis that out of five candidates she received more votes than all the other candidates put together. We are all glad to know that the two SPG Council seats which were provided to us in about 2002 in my first year on the Council Membership Committee (CMC) were, after a degree of lobbying, agreed to be maintained for the Group. There is recognition that SPG provide a significant service for a significant number of solicitors now in the region of 4500 out of the total electorate of 200,000. Looking at my previous report in the summer I said I thought we were then living in a parallel universe, which I then confidently assumed would be of short duration. That parallel universe now seems to be our new normal and it will probably feel very strange going back to our old universe, if and when that is possible. I see that I covered a very large amount of ground in my summer 2020 report. I can update that by saying that my encouragement to receive enquiries from individual solicitors has borne quite a lot of fruit and I have had a constant rewarding dialogue with individual members about particular problems. Indeed I was really gratified to see a response from one member who had recently retired and, although he had never had reason to deal directly with the SPG, he had received all our communications and said he had been very grateful to have known that we were in the background in case he needed help. That is the sort of comfort we wished provide. Obviously there will some – hopefully more – people who want to be specifically involved in the executive committee and attend conference when we are able to hold this again, but there are many people who will be glad just to read our email updates and know that they can call on us for support when necessary. What I hope we can do more of now is to involve our members with webinars making it much easier to be involved and interact with colleagues. I know that our Chair, Penny Raby and our Vice Chair, Jo Connolly, are keen to continue those and provide a regular line of communication with our members. My last communication with members was to encourage a response to the Law Society’s members vote on the reconstruction of the membership of Council, firstly by the reduction in the geographical seats and the increase of seats for specialist bodies such as ourselves, and secondly the limitation of terms of service to 12 years for Council Members. While that limitation won’t have any effect on myself, having only served one four-year term as Council member expiring next October, it will potentially impact on my colleague council member, Lubna Shuja, who in October completes eight years and the next four years will be her last under the new limitation. It is very lucky for us and for the Council that she will have a further four
spg.uk.com
What was somewhat disappointing was that only 12,000 Law Society members voted in the election, and I hope that a significant number of those were sole practitioners following my recommendation to you that you should exercise your democratic right to decide on how the professions representation should be recognised in the Law Society Council. One of Lubna’s tasks, at which I believe she is going to excel, is to improve the engagement of all members of the profession with The Law Society, as the SRA continues to disengage itself from the Law Society leaving the Law Society to be able to carry out it’s true representative functions for solicitors and let the SRA get on with the regulatory functions. For too long I believe members of the profession have seen the Law Society as linked to the regulatory function and therefore difficult to relate to for support. Continuing with the theme of elections in the febrile post Brexit and Trump election periods, I should alert you to the fact that the resolution passed recently includes a resolution that the existing system of nomination of any council member by their relevant Group should be replaced by an election of the relevant council member by the full constituency that that member will represent. In the past, possibly because of convenience, organisations such as ourselves nominated council members through the executive committee. As a result they were probably likely to be members of the executive committee. That was seen as out of touch with modern practice by the CMC. Accordingly unless anything else happens, changes of your council members in future need to be on the basis of election by the whole constituency of 4500 sole practitioners, if one could obtain their details and probably it is only our group which has an accurate database. The difficulty with that is that it could quite easily happen that one or both of the council members may not be in tune with the executive committee, in the same way that Mr Trump does not appear to have be in tune with the American legislature. I was able to persuade the Chairman of the CMC at the last council meeting approving the wording of the resolutions, that an exception for nomination could be made in exceptional circumstances. Whilst we believe that this year’s reappointment of council members will be
