Speeches by Russell.

“Making bad decisions faster is not an improvement for the women who are on the receiving end of this harassment—I mean, it is a slight improvement, but it is not the wholesale change that will sort out the culture at the Bar. I understand that you cannot intervene in individual decisions—I would not expect you to—but i…”

“I would not disagree that it has potential.”

“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…”

“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…”

“Do you think that that discloses any areas in which you should function differently?”

“What extent of protection do you think the public need from AI?”

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

“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…”

“Have you read Baroness Harman’s report, “Independent review of bullying and harassment at the Bar”?”

“The report was issued in September last year. What concrete steps have you taken in your organisation to change it to reflect the report?”

“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…”

“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?”

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

“You commented that the case for a review of the reserved legal activities is growing. Which reserved legal activities do you think need to change?”

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

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

“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?”

“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…”

“SSB Law ran a portfolio funding business model which the Civil Justice Council has recommended should be regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority as a type of loan. Do you agree with that?”

“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…”