Safety nets are a good thing.

Just ask any circus acrobat, or a dare-devil walking a tightrope. 

However safety nets can also crop up in every day life through laws and regulations that aim to keep us protected if something goes wrong.

In the legal world one of the ways that people can be protected when they use a legal service are through compensation funds managed by legal regulators.

If a lawyer's firm is closed down suddenly or the lawyer is stopped from working there can be big impacts for their clients. This could include someone working with a lawyer like a Licensed Conveyancer to buy or sell a property where often large amounts of money are being handled.

In some cases the compensation funds managed by legal regulators play a role in helping clients to recover financial losses. One of the legal regulators, the Council for Licensed Conveyancers, is currently asking for views about the compensation fund that they provide.  This includes ways to make it work effectively for people needing help from it, in terms of improving the certainty about what they can expect from the fund.

Just like all safety nets we hope we won't ever need to use it - but this is an opportunity to have your say about proposals for this compensation fund and make sure that this particular net is strong and straightforward when it needs to be.

See the consultation paper on the Council for Licensed Conveyancers' website.