Speeches by Russell.

“Turning to regulatory failure, you have previously apologised for not acting more quickly in recent high-profile collapses of law firms such as SSB Law. How is the SRA changing how it monitors and intervenes in firms in response to these failures?”

“When does that programme deliver?”

“How is the SRA responding to allegations of mis-selling with regard to high-volume no win, no fee claims?”

“The reality is that if you have an ongoing legal matter and you need ongoing support, you do not want to upset your lawyer by putting in a formal complaint about them, let alone complain to the SRA in any way, shape or form. My gut feeling is that if you did some survey work of the type that you have described of peopl…”

“It might be. It depends if the AI is hallucinating. It depends if the AI is trustworthy.”

“That is great, but fundamentally my question is about when someone instructs a solicitor, and they think it is going to cost £1,000 but then it actually costs £5,000 and that expectation has not been managed from start to finish in the transaction. They may get a retrospective explanation for why that cost escalated, b…”

“That is great, but fundamentally my question is about when someone instructs a solicitor, and they think it is going to cost £1,000 but then it actually costs £5,000 and that expectation has not been managed from start to finish in the transaction. They may get a retrospective explanation for why that cost escalated, b…”

“PM Law unexpectedly closed on 2 February, putting millions of pounds of client funds at risk. What risks were the SRA aware of prior to its closure?”

“Turning to regulatory failure, you have previously apologised for not acting more quickly in recent high-profile collapses of law firms such as SSB Law. How is the SRA changing how it monitors and intervenes in firms in response to these failures?”

“What work, if any, are you doing on AI bias? How that will be managed within the sector?”

“Perhaps, but as a regulator, that is quite a big assumption.”

“The reality is that if you have an ongoing legal matter and you need ongoing support, you do not want to upset your lawyer by putting in a formal complaint about them, let alone complain to the SRA in any way, shape or form. My gut feeling is that if you did some survey work of the type that you have described of peopl…”

“Perhaps, but as a regulator, that is quite a big assumption.”

“You were established in 2007, so the SRA is a relatively recent organisation, but not that new. I got the impression from what you just said that it was probably quite innovative work for you to speak to people who had experience of using legal services. Is that a fair characterisation?”

“You were established in 2007, so the SRA is a relatively recent organisation, but not that new. I got the impression from what you just said that it was probably quite innovative work for you to speak to people who had experience of using legal services. Is that a fair characterisation?”

“You just talked about Garfield AI, and that is an extremely interesting model. Do you feel that your regulatory framework works?”

“On that topic, I am a solicitor—I practised for nearly 14 years—and I have never heard of this website. I spent a year supervising in a law centre, and I am not aware of you having any contact with our law centre about this in that time. You say that you do a lot of promotional activity, but I was a local councillor fo…”

“What are you doing about costs? To put that comment into some context, I am a solicitor, but my experience of friends and family using law firms is that they have not received transparent information up front about costs and that they have been consistently surprised by the bills that they received. As a solicitor, I f…”

“In theory, that all sounds fantastic. There are obviously significant problems with AI models hallucinating. There are significant problems with AI models having inbuilt biases, in respect of both race and sex. How does your current regulatory strategy look at that?”

“Have you done a review of what complaints you had about this organisation? It bought a lot of firms quite rapidly, didn’t it? Did you have ongoing complaints about it?”