News from the Board

A legal sector transformed – and what comes next – Anna Bradley

05 June 2026

After eight years as Chair of the SRA Board, Anna Bradley reflects on a period of profound change in the legal sector and why the SRA's next chapter is its most important as she prepares to hand over the chair.

When I joined the SRA Board in 2019, the scene had been set for change in the legal sector. The Legal Services Act 2007 had set out an ambition to open up the market – more competition, new business structures, greater choice for consumers. And the SRA had established an approach to regulation that ensured we did not stand unnecessarily in the way of change. As anyone involved in that era will recall, the market was slow to respond and the pace of change was painfully slow. It took years for the intent of the Act to truly materialise. Now, it has accelerated and the effects are profound.

Over the last several years we have seen a wave of merger and acquisition activity reshape the profession. Larger firms have grown larger. Smaller firms have faced real, sometimes existential, pressure on their viability. We have seen the emergence of new, highly specialist businesses such as high-volume consumer claims operations. We have seen new legal business models focused on providing back-office infrastructure and scale to firms that would otherwise struggle to survive on their own. Five years ago, we oversaw 10,000 firms and that number is now closer to 9,000. This more active, more commercial marketplace has attracted a new class of investor, including private equity, with interests and incentives that are different from those of traditional legal partnerships.

There is no doubt that competition and new investment can create the opportunity to deliver better services, wider access and growth in the sector. But these forces also create new risks. In particular, the changes have raised a question about what is driving behaviour in the sector? Where is the balance between the commercial imperatives of a modern business, and the professional ethics that have always been the foundation of legal services? Getting the balance right between protecting the public and enabling a healthy, dynamic sector, is one most regulators struggle with, but it is particularly live in the legal sector right now.

Alongside this structural market change, we are living through a technological revolution that was also slow to take grip in the legal sector, but it is now transforming legal services at speed. For the first few years, technology was primarily seen as an efficiency tool – firms doing what they already did, but faster and cheaper. That drive for efficiency continues, but we are now well into a second phase in which technology is beginning to change what legal services look like.

The potential here is genuinely exciting, particularly for people who are currently poorly served by the legal system. For those who cannot afford a solicitor, or who find the process opaque and inaccessible, technology offers a real prospect of change. AI has appeared with a big bang and is challenging the very nature of legal practice, breaking down the end-to-end service model and picking off the chunks that can be delivered without a regulated profession in the driving seat. All of this raises significant new questions about consumer protection, quality, accountability, and how a market reshaped by AI and automation should be regulated.

There is a third shift, that we feel particularly acutely in our day-to-day work: the volume and nature of reports and complaints the SRA receives has changed materially. The number of concerns being raised, and the complexity of the issues involved, has grown substantially from 5,654 in the 2023/24 period to 8,955 in the 2025/26 period. This is partly a reflection of a sector under more pressure, and partly a reflection of higher expectations of what regulation should deliver.

It is important to note that this issue is system wide. It affects the Legal Ombudsman and all the other legal regulators, but it is not just legal services that are affected. This is a much wider trend that affects complaint handling bodies in every sector. This rising tide of complaints is putting our system under enormous pressure and we need to think hard about how the legal system as a whole handles complaints, and what our part in that should be.

None of these trends arrived neatly or sequentially and we have been responding to all of them simultaneously, in real time. Alongside this, we have been dealing with the fact that some of these new risks have crystallised because we did not move quickly enough. We are therefore handling the consequences of some high-profile firm failures. This all means we have had to work on twin tracks, one focussed on handling the immediate events and imminent risks, and the other focussed on steering the organisation to a better future, fast.

These forces and context are shaping how we think about what kind of regulator the SRA needs to become as we start to develop the shape of our next three-year strategy covering November 2027 to October 2030. The strategy is due for consultation this winter, but in the summer we will start early conversations with all our stakeholders about the key themes that emerge from the above. This will help us to shape the formal consultation. I hope many of you will engage with that process because the questions we want to raise are not ones the SRA can or should answer alone.

I am proud of the foundation we have built over the last eight years. I am equally clear that the job is not done, and that the next chapter requires fresh leadership. Announcing the start of the search for my successor feels like exactly the right moment to set out what I believe that next chapter needs to be about. It is going to be challenging, interesting and potentially transformative for the sector, which means it is going to be a fantastic role for the right person. Could that be you?