The Legal Services Regulatory Authority: What It Regulates, and Why It Does Not Set Your CPD

Irish legal practitioners answer to two different regulators, and the division of labour between them is routinely misunderstood. The Legal Services Regulatory Authority handles complaints, discipline and the structural regulation of legal practice. It does not set your CPD requirement.

Anyone searching the Legal Services Regulation Act 2015 for an hours figure will not find one, and the reason is worth understanding — not least because it may not stay that way.

What the LSRA actually does

Section 13 of the 2015 Act sets out its functions, which include regulating the provision of legal services and maintaining and improving standards; reviewing and advising the Minister on admission requirements, education and training, professional codes and the organisation of legal services; establishing a system of inspection of legal practitioners; receiving and investigating complaints; maintaining the Roll of Practising Barristers; promoting public awareness, including of the cost of legal services; and undertaking research and specifying minimum levels of professional indemnity insurance.

Note what that list is: a regulator of practice and conduct. The professional bodies retain education and CPD, which is why our guides to the Law Society's 25-hour CPD cycle and to solicitor CPD requirements in Ireland are the right place to look for hours.

The complaints picture in 2025

The LSRA received 1,788 complaints in 2025 — 1,699 about solicitors and 89 about barristers — a 21 per cent increase on the 1,476 received in 2024. It closed 1,933, which is 459 more than the previous year.

The outcome split is the most useful thing in the report, and it is not what most practitioners expect:

• Inadmissible: 815 (41 per cent)
• Resolved between the parties: 496 (25 per cent)
• Upheld: 177 (9 per cent) — of which 99 concerned inadequate services or excessive costs and 78 were misconduct
• Referred to the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal: 79 (4 per cent)
• Could not proceed: 116 (6 per cent)
• Withdrawn: 49 (2 per cent)

The outcomes total more than the complaints closed because 39 mixed complaints produced more than one outcome.

Two readings follow. For practitioners, the great majority of complaints end without an adverse finding: inadmissible, resolved, withdrawn and could-not-proceed together account for roughly three quarters. For complainants, a 41 per cent inadmissibility rate suggests a large volume of grievances arriving at the wrong door, which is a public understanding problem rather than a conduct one.

The number that moved sharply

The LSRA made 101 inquiry applications to the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal in 2025, against 22 in 2024 — more than a fourfold increase, all of them concerning solicitors.

A jump of that size in a single year is unlikely to reflect a sudden change in professional behaviour. It more plausibly reflects the pipeline maturing: a regulator that took on the complaints function in stages working through a backlog and reaching the referral stage in volume. Either way, it is the single most consequential figure in the report for any firm assessing its exposure, because the Tribunal is where misconduct findings are actually made.

Costs: the function and the complaints are the same problem

Two items in section 13 sit together more tightly than they first appear. The LSRA is required to promote public awareness of legal services including the cost of those services, and it is required to receive and investigate complaints.

Put the 2025 figures against that. Of the 177 complaints upheld, 99 concerned inadequate services or excessive costs — a clear majority of all adverse findings. Meanwhile 41 per cent of everything received was inadmissible, which on any reading includes a substantial number of people who did not know what the Authority could and could not look at.

So the cost transparency function and the cost complaints are two views of one issue: clients who did not understand what they would be charged, or what recourse they had. For a firm, that reframes the exposure usefully. The dominant source of upheld complaints is not legal error. It is the clarity of the engagement letter, the handling of fee estimates and the quality of communication when costs move — all fixable without touching legal competence.

Inspection, and minimum insurance

Two further section 13 functions are easy to overlook. The Authority is to establish a system of inspection of legal practitioners, a proactive power distinct from reacting to complaints. And it specifies minimum levels of professional indemnity insurance, which makes it the body setting the floor beneath every practice's cover.

Structures: LLPs and the Roll

The Authority authorised 34 limited liability partnerships in 2025, bringing the total authorised since November 2019 to 541. Fifty-nine have ceased operating, leaving 482 LLPs on the register at the end of 2025.

On the barristers' side, 3,128 barristers were on the Roll of Practising Barristers at 31 December 2025, up from 3,071 at the start of the year. Of those, 2,137 are Law Library members and 991 are not — so close to a third of practising barristers operate outside the Law Library, a structural fact about the profession that the Roll makes visible. During the year 161 barristers were added, 144 of them new entrants, and 104 were removed.

Education and training: the part that is still being built

This is where the LSRA's role is genuinely unsettled, and where anyone involved in legal training should be paying attention.

What it does today: keep under review and make recommendations to the Minister on the availability and quality of education and training, including ongoing training for solicitors and barristers, and disseminate information on education and accreditation requirements. It is an advisory and reporting role.

What it does not do today: set or enforce CPD requirements. Those remain with the professional bodies.

What is coming: a temporary Legal Education and Training Committee operates under section 16 of the Act and is developing a competency framework and processes for accrediting providers. The independent Legal Practitioner Education and Training Committee, which would set and maintain education standards across all providers, has not yet been established — its legislation is still being prepared.

For a training provider that is the line to watch. Provider accreditation in Irish legal education is being designed now, by a committee on a temporary footing, under a framework that has not yet been legislated. That is a regime in formation rather than one to comply with, and the time to understand it is while the competency framework is being drafted.

How this compares with the neighbouring regimes

England and Wales split the same functions differently again. Solicitors there work to a continuing competence model rather than an hours requirement, with firm-level accountability resting on named individuals — see our guides to the COLP and COFA roles and to the SRA's minimum terms for professional indemnity insurance, the direct counterpart to the LSRA's power to specify minimum PII levels. Barristers there answer to a separate regulator again, covered in our guide to Bar Standards Board CPD requirements.

Ethics obligations sit across all of these, and we cover the Irish position in legal ethics CPD for solicitors and barristers.

Our suggestions

Keep the two regulators separate in your internal documents. A firm policy that cites "LSRA CPD requirements" is citing something that does not exist, and the error signals that nobody checked.

Read the complaints data as an operational signal rather than a league table. Ninety-nine of the 177 upheld complaints concerned inadequate services or excessive costs — client communication and billing practice, not legal competence, and the most addressable category in the whole report.

And if you deliver legal training, track the section 16 committee's competency framework work now. Accreditation regimes are far easier to influence while they are being designed than to comply with once they are not.