Annual surveys
The initial self-assessment form includes (as Part A) a brief survey asking incorporated legal practices to give us on a strictly confidential basis some basic information about their firm including information about:
- the firm’s non-legal directors and their occupations;
- its shareholders and their relationship to the practice;
- the number and make up of its employees;
- its primary areas of practice;
- its estimated gross fee income for the financial year;
- the services it provides other than legal services, if any;
- details of its professional indemnity insurance policy;
- the number of claims against that policy during the previous financial year, if any; and
- the number of claims that were paid, if any.
We require incorporated legal practices to update that information annually by completing an Annual Survey every March / April at the same time as solicitors submit their annual practising certificate renewals.
That information will be useful for profession analysis purposes and will enable us for example to compare and contrast incorporated legal practices with more traditionally structured law firms. More importantly, however, it will help us design compliance audit ‘products’ that are more relevant and appropriate to the firms we are auditing and better targeted to the firms most at risk of non-compliance. That will enable us to do our job better and at the same time to reduce the compliance costs to firms.
The Annual Survey will be available on-line by mid-to late 2009 and should take no more than 10 minutes to complete.- Click here to see and/or print out a hard copy version of the Annual Survey form.