It is a brave goal and no doubt many in the profession hope that she is right. Last year was the Society’s ‘annus horribilis’ – the Society was rocked by allegations of bullying leading to the resignation of vice-president Kamlesh Bahl, was under threat from the Lord Chancellor to strip it of its regulatory powers, and faced a crisis over its complaints handling. "Two and a half years – that’s the time I think it takes to turn an organisation around and settle it properly," the new chief exec reckons. Paraskeva can hardly be accused of ducking a challenge and comes to the job from the national Lottery Charities Board, where she was director. She adds that many things will change much more quickly than that. For example, she reports that the number of outstanding complaints at the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors (OSS) is coming down daily. Another short term target is to present the professional body’s high level strategic priorities to the Council by the end of the year. Putting to one side the "fancy management speak", she explains this comes down to three things: "what is our prime purpose, what does that mean in reality, and how do we get there". Last week, the Society sent out a consultation paper – A New Law Society for a Changing Profession – to its 80,000 members. Paraskeva gives its recommendations her personal endorsement explaining that that she was briefed on its contents before taking up the new position. "To start the job and then find out that I had real difficulties with that would have been a bit of a non-starter," she adds. There have already been initial murmurs of dissent from solicitors about the proposals to increase the size of the council from 75 to 120. Surely one of the problems with the Society has been that it has been overly bureaucratic? "I don’t think the size of council is what makes an organisation unwieldy," she replies. "What you need to counter that accusation is an organisation that has clear lines of accountability and clear roles." Another proposal which stands out is a ‘polluter pays’ scheme where those firms with bad complaints records would have to contribute more to the Society’s costs. Again, she stands by the measure. "Solicitors want to make sure their profession behaves well and believe that if people don’t they should be called to account for it." It is early days, but is the new chief exec impressed by the lawyers’ commitment to change? She says that consultation exercises like this can be as "long as a piece of string" but this one "courageously" sets out what it wants from a new, improved Society. "I think radical enough to take us into the 21st century," she declares. Not surprisingly, the contentious issue of complaints against the profession is taking up much of her time. Last year the backlog hit 17,000 and Ann Abraham, the Legal Service Ombudsman, in her last report, accused the Society of sitting by while the solicitors' complaints system "lurched from one self-destructive strategy to another". Paraskeva points out that until the old complaints are dealt with they will continue to drag down the processing of present claims. "So we take the tail of that backlog with us for a little while," she says, adding that the average processing time now is under three months. But she is "optimistic" that the OSS is on target to get the queue of complainants down to 6,000 by the end of the year in accordance with government targets. So how do the demands of the job compare to the Lottery? "That was setting up an organisation from scratch, in the public eye and with the pressure of speed," she says. "This is also in the public eye and we’ve got to change things quickly but this is about changing an established organisation." (30/10/00) If you have any comments about this or any other news item or feature, please respond via e-mail to: newsroom@butterworths.com |
In
her first month at the helm of the Law Society, new chief executive Janet
Paraskeva reckons that she can bring the beseiged Society into ship-shape
order within three years.