Michael Napier CBE KC is a former president of the Law Society and was the Attorney-General's pro bono envoy between 2001 and 2015. He was also the Chairman Emeritus of Harbour Litigation Ltd. He was voted ‘Lawyer of the Year’ in the 2012 Legal Business awards for his 30 years as a senior partner with leading practice Irwin Mitchell. Now retired, we was also a director of Michael Napier Consulting Ltd. When Napier was appointed President of the Law Society in 2001 the Office of Fair Trading published its report on competition in the legal profession. This was followed by Sir David Clementi's report on regulation and the Government's white paper ‘Putting Consumers First’. The subsequent

Legal Services Act 2007 The Legal Services Act 2007 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that seeks to liberalise and regulate the market for legal services in England and Wales, to encourage more competition and to provide a new route for consumer compla ...

introduced Alternative Business Structures (ABS) and established the

Legal Services Board The Legal Services Board is an independent body responsible for overseeing the regulation of lawyers in England and Wales. It is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Ministry of Justice, created through the Legal Services Act of 2007 ...

to which Napier was appointed in 2008. Following the introduction of the Access to Justice Act in 1999 Napier was one of the initial appointees to the

Civil Justice Council The Civil Justice Council is a UK non-departmental public body that advises the Lord Chancellor on civil justice and civil procedure in England and Wales. It was established in 1998 under section 6 of the Civil Procedure Act 1997 and is sponsore ...

(CJC) on which he served for 10 years and co-authored a number of influential papers on the funding and costs of civil cases. As a consultant to the CJC he chaired the group that produced the Code of Conduct for third party litigation funders in 2011 and the CJC working party on contingency fees recommended by Lord Justice Jackson's report on civil litigation costs (to which Napier was an assessor) and now legalised by the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Napier, Michael Year of birth missing (living people) Living people English lawyers