Catherine McGinley, Chair

In 2025, the committee completed its reformulation of the Precedent Terms and Conditions for solicitors. The finished precedent was uploaded to the Law Society’s website in September 2025 and published in the November 2025 Gazette. This was the culmination of significant and time-consuming work by the committee at large and, more particularly, the subcommittee convened for this purpose.

We continued our review of existing practice notes and the drafting of new notes. Work continued through 2025 and into the current year on updates to practice notes on the administration of estates, data retention, and principal and agency. The process requires inter-committee consultation, which is ongoing.

In conjunction with this work, the committee has continued to develop and publish its ‘ten-step guides’, commencing in 2025 on its ‘ten steps to supervising junior solicitors and trainees’ and ‘ten steps to managing stress’.

In the second half of the year, the committee contributed to the Law Society’s AI Forum and the guidelines that were subsequently produced. Work in this area is continuing, and the committee is pleased to contribute to the coordinated Law Society response to this important area.

The annual Guidance and Ethics Committee workshop for the panel of solicitors who assist colleagues in regulatory difficulty took place in October. Presentations were made on the content of training provided to newly qualified solicitors, recent trends and statistics arising out of the Legal Services Regulation Act 2015, and cybersecurity in the context of solicitors’ accounts.

The committee continued to offer helpline assistance to colleagues on ethical and practice issues. The helpline receives a large volume of queries from colleagues annually, and work commenced in 2025 on an article outlining the most common queries. We expect to submit this for publication to the profession in the coming months. Helpline queries are generally assessed first by the committee’s secretary, with members operating a voluntary monthly rota system to respond to queries that might require specific guidance. We encourage any colleague with an issue they may wish to discuss to make contact with us.

The committee continued to deliver CPD courses, particularly at cluster events.

We gratefully acknowledges the support of the Law Society’s staff in our work, especially David Mulvihill and Clare Doheny.