Modern and progressive

CILEX Chair Professor Chris Bones reflects on the transformational progress made over the past five years and the next steps CILEX will be taking to further enhance the standing of members

I have led the CILEX board for five years now. It has been a huge privilege to work on your behalf and, whilst at times it has been an uphill struggle to manage our way through the scale of change necessary, the last three years have started to show real movement in the standing of the profession and the capability of your institute to develop and grow CILEX into a modern, progressive and attractive professional body.

Much of this has been achieved through quiet conversation, persuasion, analysis and persistent engagement with key decision-makers and influencers in government, opposition, Parliament, regulatory bodies, employer organisations and other professional bodies. The heavy lifting required to change our qualification and our apprenticeship proposition has taken a vast amount of work by CILEX staff and detailed material development.

Key achievements

The outcome has been transformational when compared with where we were five years ago, as you will see from the following advances:

“Much of this has been achieved through quiet conversation, persuasion, analysis and persistent engagement with key decision-makers and influencers” 

• Our professional qualification now delivers fully authorised specialist lawyers at the point of qualification and has redefined legal training to include ethics, digital skills, communication skills, business skills and project management. In comparison, the Solicitors Qualifying Exam lacks focus on the specialist reality of legal practice and fails to integrate the wider skills that employers are looking for;
• Chartered Legal Executives will be able to certify copies of powers of attorney once the Bill putting this right has completed its progress through Parliament later this year;
• All the major mortgage lenders bar one now accept, or are about to accept, CILEX-led conveyancing firms onto their panels. We will be engaging with HSBC over the next few months to encourage it to come on board;
• As an experienced Chartered Legal Executive, you can now apply for appointments as an Upper Tribunal judge and a Recorder – just as a solicitor can;
• Our apprenticeship educational standard has now been established by the Department of Education as equivalent to that of a solicitor – the first time the equivalence of our qualifications has had formal recognition. Even better, the funding allocation for our CILEX Lawyer apprenticeships is the same as those granted to the solicitor qualification;
• We are currently in discussion regarding the operation of a CILEX equivalent to the Criminal Litigation Accreditation Scheme enabling our qualified criminal members to be able to be certified as duty lawyers directly through CILEX. We hope to have this in place by the end of the year.
• We hope that early next year, we will see the government tabling the final legislative changes we have campaigned for to fully establish our professional equivalence, namely the removal of the requirement for a general qualification in law to be appointed as a Crown Prosecutor.

I am extraordinarily proud of our staff and my board colleagues who have worked tirelessly on your behalf. Their work ensures that there is no longer anything that anyone can point to suggesting that, when qualified to the same extent, there is any reason to pay you less, treat you with less respect or refuse to give you the career recognition you deserve.

Our priorities

This set of achievements hasn’t been without some pain and considerable costs, particularly in developing new qualifications, the apprenticeships work and the changes required in our back-office systems to support these and enable the organisation to run effectively.

We have come a long way but there is a remaining set of issues that we are still engaged with, namely:

• We still do not have a sufficiently accessible process that allows Chartered Legal Executives without practice rights to achieve these without the burden of excessive time and cost – often borne by them directly;
• We face confusion and a lack of understanding amongst consumers about who we are and the level of our qualifications – especially for fully qualified lawyers who continue to be referred to as legal executives by their firms, which can often sound to the uninitiated as a junior position;
• We have a large and committed number of paralegal members who, unlike those looking to progress to a fully authorised practitioner, have no industry-accepted career framework, professional standards or recognised regulatory structure;
• Our members are not treated as equals in terms of representation and voting rights within CILEX, creating artificial barriers to engagement which can mean we do not hear from every section of the membership equally when setting priorities; and
• Many of our members work in environments that, despite all of the above, still treat them as second-class citizens, withhold investment from them in terms of training and development, pass them over for promotion even when they meet the criteria, and pay them less for doing the same work – often to a better standard – than solicitors.

This summer we plan to launch a public consultation that will incorporate proposals that we believe will help CILEX address the first four of these issues. The proposals will also enhance our standing as a profession, making it clear to consumers that we are qualified lawyers, enhance our attractiveness to paralegals and their employers and ensure that every member has a voice. 

Our new president is rightly focusing on the employment experience of CILEX members – and, as a member herself, she is by far the best person to do so. As a former senior executive in industry and as a non-executive on various boards over the years, I cannot think of any data on employment experience that I have seen that has been worse than that shared by many CILEX members. 

This has to change and, as Emma is outlining elsewhere in the Journal, we are determined to make it change – recognising that it will take years to deliver a shift. The achievements of the last few years give us a solid base on which to engage your employers and, where they today continue to discriminate, help you to give them the facts that will encourage them to change their attitudes.