Impact from Mazur

[Runningalongnicely]

The law firm I work for has many unqualified staff members working for them - including me - in supervisory roles. Post Mazur I am not happy to sign documents/supervise etc but I’ve been told it’s BAU and to carry on. I have 10 years + experience but not CILEX/FILEX. What are firms doing to support unqualified staff and comply with Mazur? Many thanks

As a matter of interest, what area of law are you in? It sounds like you may be a conveyancer, in which case you're quite right, there's been a race to the bottom over the past couple of decades.

I am a Lit Exec unqualified. Cìlex challenged the case a few weeks ago and won.

I work under a partner so I just make sure everything I draft is supervised and there is a supervision trail on file. Has always been like that for me really.

Yes - I work in conveyancing.

I sympathise - conveyancing these days is not a good place to be. But as I've said, you're fully entitled to rely on your employer to ensure that they are running the practice compliantly. Individual employees are not expected to verify this themselves.

If you really wanted to cover yourself I suppose you could put your concerns in writing to your employer, and seek reassurance that everything was OK. However, the risk is that by drawing their attention to the issue you might be shooting yourself in the foot - they might, having been forced to confront the problem, conclude that they weren't complying and that you'd have to leave.

If I were you I'd just keep your head down, keep calm and carry on!