The Legal Services Board - the independant body overseeing the regulation of lawyers in England and Wales - is announcing the start of a statutory investigation into how best to protect consumers in the will-writing, probate and estate administration markets.

The announcement continues a process begun in the Summer of 2010, when the Board asked the Legal Services Consumer Panel to provide it with advice on consumer's experiences of the will-writing market. Since then, it has worked alongside the Panel (including through generating original research co-sponsored by the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Office for Fair Trading) to develop a greater understanding of the way the will-writing market operates and problems that consumers face, including a mystery shopping exercise on the quality of wills produced by different types of provider.

The Board considered the advice of the Panel and the research report. The Panel's report highlighted many problems faced by consumers when buying a will and the qualitative research demonstrated that too many wills, written by both Solicitors and unregulated will-writers, failed to reflect what the client intended and made other basic errors.

The Board has therefore concluded that it should begin a formal statutory investigation to identify what changes there may need to be to regulation in these three markets.  This is the first time that the Board has used its powers under Sections 24 and 26 of the Legal Services Act 2007 to examine whether a specific activity should be added to the list of reserved activities - meaning those services which can only be provided by persons authorised by approved regulators in the legal services market. The Board will shortly notify the Lord Chancellor and begin wider discussions under the provisions of those sections so that it can determine whether reservation is appropriate and what regulatory arrangements should flow from that.

In the meantime the Board is asking the current regulators and trade bodies to explore the immediate steps that can be taken within the existing regulatory structures to raise standards across the market place.