A quiet update with a very obvious background
The SRA has now published revised guidance on effective supervision following the Court of Appeal decision in Mazur & Stuart v Charles Russell Speechlys LLP & Others. Slightly oddly, the guidance does not mention Mazur by name, although there is no real doubt as to what prompted the changes. The guidance refers instead to the Court of Appeal’s clarification in March 2026 that an unauthorised person can lawfully perform tasks within the scope of the conduct of litigation for and on behalf of an authorised individual, such as a solicitor, appropriately authorised legal executive or appropriately authorised barrister.
That clarification was very welcome. The initial High Court decision had caused considerable alarm across litigation departments, debt recovery teams, volume claims practices, local authority teams and many other parts of the profession where litigation work is routinely carried out by mixed teams of solicitors, legal executives, paralegals, trainees and other non-authorised staff. For a time, it appeared that a great deal of perfectly ordinary litigation practice might have been rendered unlawful almost overnight. The Court of Appeal restored a workable position. However, the SRA’s revised guidance makes equally clear that the answer is not for firms to breathe a sigh of relief and return to informal, undocumented and lightly supervised working arrangements.
That is probably the most important point. Mazur has not become a “nothing to see here” moment. It has become a supervision moment.
What the Court of Appeal actually clarified
The Court of Appeal clarified the boundary of the criminal offence under the Legal Services Act 2007. It confirmed that an unauthorised person is not themselves “carrying on” the conduct of litigation if they are genuinely acting for and on behalf of an authorised individual who retains responsibility for the delegated task. That is a crucial distinction. It means that non-authorised employees can continue to play a substantial role in litigation work. They can, in appropriate circumstances, carry out tasks which fall within the conduct of litigation. The authorised individual does not have to personally press every button, file every document, send every procedural letter or approve every routine step in advance.
However, that is only half of the story. The other half is that the authorised individual must genuinely be in charge. They must retain responsibility. They must exercise proper direction, management, supervision and control. They must be sufficiently experienced and competent to supervise the work. They must understand what is being done in their name or under their authority. They must be able to justify the delegation arrangements. The firm must also be able to show that its supervision model is more than a name on a file-opening screen or a partner’s initials appearing somewhere in the case management system.
The SRA has not created a new duty, but the focus has changed
The SRA’s revised guidance is therefore important because it shifts the profession from the immediate panic caused by the High Court decision into a more practical but still demanding regulatory framework. It does not create a new rule requiring firms to have supervision. That requirement was already there. Paragraph 3.5 of the Code of Conduct for Solicitors, RELs, RFLs and RSLs requires solicitors who supervise or manage others providing legal services to remain accountable for the work carried out through them and to supervise effectively. Paragraph 3.6 requires solicitors to make sure that those they manage are competent to carry out their role and keep their professional knowledge and skills up to date. The Code of Conduct for Firms also requires firms to have an effective system for supervising client matters and to have effective governance arrangements, systems and controls.
What has changed is the level of attention now being paid to those obligations. Before Mazur, many firms may have regarded supervision as one of those broad regulatory concepts that everyone accepted in principle but that was sometimes implemented loosely in practice. A team might say that a senior solicitor “supervises” a group of paralegals, when what this really means is that the solicitor is available if someone asks a question. A department might say that a partner has overall responsibility for the work, when in reality the partner has very limited day-to-day visibility of the caseload. A case management system might identify a solicitor as matter supervisor, although the person actually making procedural decisions is someone else.
The revised SRA guidance makes this much harder to defend. The SRA says that firms and individuals are accountable for the actions of those they supervise. It expects legal services providers to arrange for one or more appropriately experienced individuals to supervise the legal services the firm provides. Those supervisors should be appropriately qualified and experienced both in the relevant area of law and in supervising the delivery of legal services. This is not simply a matter of status. A person may be qualified but still not competent to supervise a particular type of work. A solicitor with little or no experience of a specialist area cannot safely be used as a nominal supervisor for a highly experienced but unauthorised colleague unless there are clear systems, safeguards and support arrangements that make the supervision real.
Supervision must be risk-based
The SRA also emphasises that supervision should be risk-based. There is no single model that will be appropriate for every firm, every department or every type of work. A low-value, highly standardised process may not require the same level of prior approval as complex High Court litigation, urgent injunction work, immigration work involving serious personal consequences, or litigation involving vulnerable clients. Equally, a newly recruited paralegal, a trainee in their first seat and an experienced litigation executive will not need the same level of day-to-day checking. The point is not that every delegated task must be smothered in sign-offs. The point is that the firm must have thought about the risks and designed supervision arrangements that fit those risks.
That is where some firms may now find themselves exposed. The Court of Appeal may have removed the immediate fear that ordinary delegation within a regulated firm is a criminal offence. It has not removed the regulatory risk where the supervision is weak. Indeed, the SRA guidance makes the regulatory risk more visible. Firms need to consider who is supervising the work, how many people they are supervising, how much of each person’s work they are seeing, how often they are communicating, whether supervision is face-to-face, remote or hybrid, and whether the supervisor has enough capacity to do the job properly. A supervisor with a full fee-earning caseload, management responsibilities, client development duties and responsibility for a large team of unsupervised case handlers may look efficient on a spreadsheet. It may look rather less convincing in an SRA investigation.
Need to evidence the supervision that took place
The guidance is particularly useful in its treatment of recording. The SRA does not say that every conversation, every email and every informal comment on a draft must be recorded. That would be unrealistic and would quickly become a compliance industry of its own. However, firms should be able to evidence the supervision arrangements they have chosen for each area of work and the risk-based reasons for that approach. They should also consider how supervisors and supervisees are expected to record supervision in practice, including one-to-one meetings, casework discussions, file reviews, feedback and learning points. In other words, the file or the firm’s systems should be able to tell a credible story about how the work was supervised.
This is directly relevant to conduct of litigation. The whole Mazur debate has shown that the label attached to someone’s role is less important than what they are actually doing. If an unauthorised person is making substantive decisions about proceedings, determining strategy, dealing with the court or other parties as though they are responsible for the litigation, and doing so without proper direction from an authorised person, the firm will have a problem. That problem may not necessarily be the criminal offence under section 14 of the Legal Services Act 2007 in every case, but it may well be a serious regulatory problem. The SRA’s revised guidance expressly states that serious failure to meet supervision requirements may lead to enforcement action even where there has been no direct harm to clients.
Delegation is protected; abdication is not
This is the practical trap for firms. The appeal decision in Mazur protects legitimate delegation. It does not protect abdication. There is a large difference between an authorised solicitor retaining responsibility for a matter while delegating tasks to competent colleagues, and an authorised solicitor being used as a regulatory umbrella for work that is in reality being run by unauthorised staff. Firms that were already operating with proper supervision, sensible escalation points, file review, clear authority levels and active oversight should not need to reinvent their entire litigation model. They should, however, check that their arrangements are clear, documented and aligned with the revised guidance. Firms that were operating on the basis of “the paralegals know what they are doing and will shout if they need help” have more work to do.
The SRA’s case studies are also instructive because they show the difference between a system that is designed and monitored, and a system that merely exists. A template, process map or workflow can be useful, but it is not a substitute for supervision. If the underlying law or facts change, someone needs to notice. If complaints begin to emerge, someone needs to investigate. If case handlers are ignoring information from opponents or clients because the process map does not tell them what to do with it, the problem is not solved by pointing to the process map. A system that is not monitored is not much of a control.
What a practical supervision framework should cover
For many firms, the practical response should be to create or refresh a supervision framework. This does not have to be elaborate, but it does need to be real. Firms should identify who is authorised to supervise particular types of work, what experience they have, how many people and matters they supervise, what tasks may be delegated, what tasks require prior approval, what issues must be escalated, how file reviews are carried out, how remote workers are supervised, how supervision is recorded, and how the firm tests whether the system is actually working.
In litigation teams, Infolegal’s updated Guidance Note No. 13, Litigation Roles and Reserved Activities – post Mazur, provides a practical model for doing this. It recommends identifying a named Responsible Litigator for each litigated matter, maintaining a register of authorised individuals, mapping tasks according to whether they fall inside or outside the conduct of litigation, setting the level of supervision required for delegated tasks, and recording key supervision decisions in a proportionate way. That model fits neatly with the SRA’s revised guidance because it is risk-based, evidence-based and focused on genuine responsibility rather than formal labels.
The Responsible Litigator model is also useful because it forces the firm to answer a simple question: who is actually conducting this litigation? If the answer is a named authorised individual who understands the matter, has approved the strategy, controls the key procedural decisions, is available to supervise the team and has the capacity and competence to do so, the firm is likely to be in a much stronger position. If the answer is “technically a partner, but in practice the case handler runs everything”, the firm should not be reassured by the word “technically”.
The lessons go beyond litigation
The revised SRA guidance is also a reminder that supervision is not only about litigation. Mazur may have brought the issue to the surface because of the reserved activity of the conduct of litigation, but the same broad principles apply across the firm. Conveyancing teams, private client departments, volume claims teams, family teams, legal aid departments, consultants, remote workers, trainees, paralegals and senior fee earners all need appropriate supervision arrangements. The level and form will vary. The need for genuine oversight does not.
Nor should firms overlook the cultural aspect. Good supervision is not simply a compliance mechanism. It is how firms maintain standards, support staff, identify risk, prevent mistakes becoming systemic, and protect clients. A firm in which junior staff are afraid to admit uncertainty, remote staff are left to manage alone, or experienced non-authorised staff are expected to carry responsibility they are not legally permitted to carry is storing up trouble. The SRA’s guidance links supervision with competence, workplace environment, support, escalation and accountability. Those themes should not be treated as separate regulatory silos. They are all part of the same management obligation.
Cautious relief, not complacency
The sensible message for firms is therefore one of cautious relief but not complacency. The Court of Appeal has restored a practical basis on which litigation teams can operate. The SRA has now provided guidance that recognises the reality of delegation in modern legal practice. But the price of that flexibility is proper supervision. Firms do not need to stop using paralegals, trainees, litigation executives or other non-authorised staff in meaningful legal work. They do need to make sure that those staff are working within clear authority, under proper oversight, and with appropriate access to competent supervisors.
The Mazur saga has been disruptive, but it may ultimately have served a useful purpose. It has forced firms to confront a question that should always have been asked: are our supervision arrangements real, or are they just assumed? For firms with good systems, the answer may be reassuring. For others, the SRA’s revised guidance should be treated as a prompt to act now.
The final message for firms
The worst response would be to assume that because the High Court decision was overturned, nothing needs to change. The better response is to take the Court of Appeal decision as permission to delegate, and the SRA guidance as a clear warning that delegation must be properly managed. Firms that can show that will be much better placed. Firms that cannot may find that Mazur has not gone away at all; it has simply moved from the courtroom into the regulator’s file.
