Welcome to the Legal Services Board

The Legal Services Board is an oversight regulator. Our jurisdiction covers England and Wales and we are independent from both the legal profession and government.

This means that we monitor the performance of the ten approved legal regulators to ensure that they meet expected standards, and we ask them to take steps to change when they don’t meet these standards. However, we leave frontline regulation to the regulators themselves and we’re legally prohibited from intervening in individual complaints about a lawyer or regulator.

We set the expected performance standards for regulators and assess applications for changes to a regulator’s rules to ensure that any new rules align with the regulatory objectives, such as protecting consumers. We ensure that our work is well informed by doing regular research to find out what legal consumers need and how the market is responding.

We log all the correspondence that we receive about regulators. This may help us to shape policy and standards in favour of a better legal marketplace, to create consistency and high standards across a varied system of regulation.