1 – The legal services sector in Wales
In this chapter, we provide an introduction to the main characteristics of the legal services sector in Wales. We discuss its composition, including statistical data on the distribution of services and their availability across Wales, the contribution it makes to the Welsh economy, and the issues that appear to affect its growth and transformation, including in relation to the adoption and development of legal technology. 1.1 Composition and key characteristics Wales operates as part of the legal jurisdiction of England and Wales, and is separate to those of Scotland and Northern Ireland. Under the Government of Wales Act 2006, Wales does not have its own legal system or judiciary, but has the power to make legislation in several devolved areas. The distribution of legal services in Wales is mostly concentrated in South Wales, with around 34% of all legal activities enterprises in Wales based in Cardiff, followed by 13% in Swansea. 5 Most of the commercial legal services in Wales are based in these two cities. Outside of these cities, legal services may not be as readily accessible, especially in rural areas. a) Solicitors and law firms According to the Law Society’s Annual Statistics Report 2021 6 , as of July 2021, the number of practising certificate (PC) holders in Wales was 3,977, a 7.6 % increase compared to the 2011 statistics (3,683 PC holders). The number has also increased in the period 2019-2021, with 78 more PC holders (+ 2.0 %). 7 Despite this increase, the size of the cohort of solicitors practising in Wales has shrunk from 3.1% of the overall PC holders in England and Wales in 2011, to 2.6 % in 2021. 8 Taking into account population data for England and Wales as of mid-2021 9 , the ratio 10 of solicitors to people living in Wales was 1:781, substantially lower than the ratio of 1:417 in England. 5 Guto Ifan, The Legal Economy in Wales (Wales Governance Centre, Cardiff University, May 2019) available at https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/1699217/Legal-Economy-report-FINAL.pdf. 6 Law Society, Trends in the solicitors' profession: annual statistics report 2021 (21 September 2022), available at https://prdsitecore93.azureedge.net/-/media/files/topics/research/annual-statistics-report-2021-september-2022.pdf. 7 Ibid, in comparison with Law Society, Trends in the solicitors' profession: annual statistics report 2019 (19 October 2020), available at https://prdsitecore93.azureedge.net/-/media/files/topics/research/law-society-annual-statistics-report-2019.pdf. The number of PC holders in Wales was 3,899 in 2019 and 3,977 in 2021. 8 Law Society (n 6), 15. 9 According to which, 56,536,000 people lived in England and 3,105,000 in Wales as of mid-2021. See Office for National Statistics, “Population estimates for the UK, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland: mid-2021” (21 December 2022), available at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/bulletins/annualmidyear populationestimates/mid2021. 10 This ratio has been calculated using (i) for the number of solicitors (3,977 PC holders in Wales and 135,479 in England), the Law Society statistics for 2021 (n 6); (ii) for the population data for Wales and England (3,105,000 and 56,536,000 respectively), the Office of National Statistics population estimates for mid-2021 (n 9).
5
Made with FlippingBook HTML5