Why does the legal sector need all these regulators?

This week I attended the first LegalFutures.co.uk conference, at which spoke such luminaries as Richard Susskind and Neil Kinsella, as well as some regulator chiefs of whom most of us have only barely heard.

But what was most interesting about the conference wasn't Susskind's speech, though it was thought-provoking and fun, as always.

It wasn't hearing Kinsella pithily describe why external investors will only see value in law firms that are more like 'real' businesses, not thinly capitalised traditional law firms from which the profits are filched yearly by the partner base.

It wasn't listening to David Edmonds, head of the Legal Services Board, try to defend why he thinks it's not his business to speak out against legal aid cuts when, surely, it's legal service providers that deliver those legal aid services and Joe Public that consumes them. The LSB, by the way, has so far (claimed Baroness Deech of the Bar Standards Board, pictured second from the left) cost us £27 million.

It wasn't even hearing Charles Plant, chairman of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (pictured, far left), call for a single legal services regulator and point to the madness that currently exists in regulation, in which there are eight regulators and one uber-regulator. Errant madness? I think so, but then I think that the profession shouldn't be split and that reserved work needs a serious shake-up, so by rights most of the regulators, if they cared, would probably want me shot.

What it was, this most interesting thing, was sitting in the second row directly behind Edmonds and his assistant while a panel of the heads of all the regulators present (the SRA, the BSB, the Institute for Legal Executives and the Council for Licensed Conveyancers, pictured left to right) spent five minutes each 'pitching' to Edmonds to become ABS regulators. All this after Plant had said how mad it was that there are so many regulators, and after everyone else agreed.

If I was running a law firm - and there are many, many reasons why I'm not - I would have been spitting feathers listening to the posturing that took place on Monday.

Why is the legal sector paying for this enormous redundancy? Isn't it David Edmonds' raison d'etre to look into how consumers, clients, can be better served by the legal sector?

If it is, and I say it is, the first thing he should be doing is working out how he can wipe out this regulatory morass. The second thing he should be doing is working out how he can make his own position, and the LSB, equally redundant.

The legal sector needs this proliferation of regulators like it needs a hole in the head. Sitting in front of a panel of regulators certainly made me physically feel like I was being trepanned. Perhaps I can sue someone for the pain and suffering…

[PS - the lady on the far right of the panel is Baroness Diane Hayter, chairwoman of the Legal Services Consumer Panel. On her shoulders much hope rests.]