The Court of Appeal’s decision in CILEX and others v Mazur and others [2026] EWCA Civ 369 has resolved an issue that, by the time of the appeal, had already caused real uncertainty across the profession.
The legal question on appeal was: If a supervised but unauthorised member of staff issued proceedings, served documents or took some other step that formed part of the conduct of litigation, was that person committing a criminal offence under section 14 of the Legal Services Act 2007 unless they were personally authorised? That was, in substance, the position which Sheldon J’s decision in the first instance had endorsed. The Court of Appeal has now rejected it.
For many years, litigation has not depended on every formal step being taken personally by an authorised solicitor or authorised CILEX lawyer.
The Court of Appeal has now made clear that the Legal Services Act 2007 (LSA) does not criminalise the ordinary and supervised delegation of litigation tasks to unauthorised staff acting for and on behalf of an authorised individual. The authorised person remains the one carrying on the conduct of litigation, provided responsibility remains with them and proper arrangements for supervision, management and control are in place.
This article is therefore about what the Court of Appeal actually decided, why it decided it, what it restores to practitioners and what the episode says about regulatory clarity in an area carrying criminal implications.
What happened in the first instance
Charles Russell Speechlys LLP (CRS) had brought a claim against Mrs Mazur and Mr Stuart for unpaid legal fees of just over £50,000. The claim was issued on its behalf by Goldsmith Bowers Solicitors (GBS) using Money Claims Online. What turned the matter into something much larger was the fact that the Particulars of Claim had been signed by Peter Middleton, who did not hold a practising certificate. Mrs Mazur and Mr Stuart challenged the validity of what had been done on the basis that Mr Middleton was unlawfully conducting litigation.
From that point, a relatively ordinary fees claim became the vehicle for a much wider argument about the meaning of the conduct of litigation under the Legal Services Act 2007 and the lawfulness of delegated litigation work carried out by supervised but unauthorised staff.
The matter first came before DDJ Graham Campbell. DDJ Campbell noted that Mr Middleton had previously been suspended from practice as a solicitor, but that the SRA had later granted GBS permission to employ him as a Senior Litigation Executive. CRS argued that GBS, as an authorised entity, had the right to conduct litigation and that this was sufficient. Mrs Mazur and Mr Stuart argued that it was not, relying in part on authority which they said showed that separate authorisation was required for the individual carrying out the reserved activity.
DDJ Campbell concluded that the fact that Mr Middleton’s employer was an authorised entity did not itself give Mr Middleton the right to conduct reserved legal activities. He then held that if Mr Middleton had issued proceedings, they were a nullity and should be struck out. He did not finally determine the point at that stage, because he considered it inappropriate to do so without giving GBS an opportunity to explain its position. He therefore stayed the proceedings and directed that any application to lift the stay must be supported by evidence from a partner at GBS giving a full explanation.
CRS then applied to lift the stay, supported by the evidence of Mr Ashall, a solicitor and director of GBS. Mr Ashall accepted that Mr Middleton was not himself entitled to conduct reserved legal activities, but nevertheless said that neither Mr Middleton nor GBS had done anything wrong. His evidence was that Mr Middleton had taken various steps in the matter, including giving advice, taking instructions, drafting the claim form, submitting it to the court using the firm’s online account, serving statements of case, having internal discussions with Mr Ashall and instructing counsel. Mr Ashall said that he, as a practising solicitor and authorised person, had the conduct of the litigation and that in issuing proceedings Mr Middleton had merely been supporting him in that role. He explained that GBS employed a number of non-authorised fee earners who issued proceedings in support of authorised persons within the firm and said that this was standard practice in commercial debt recovery. He also described the supervision arrangements in place, including regular discussions on individual cases and monthly face-to-face meetings.
The SRA then became involved in a way that later attracted criticism from the Court of Appeal. On 2 December 2024, after Mr Ashall self-reported, the SRA decided not to investigate. In doing so it said that because GBS was authorised under the LSA 2007, its employees were permitted to undertake reserved activities by reason of section 21(3) and that Mr Middleton had not conducted a reserved legal activity without entitlement. It also said that there were no concerns about Mr Ashall’s supervision of Mr Middleton’s work.
The application to lift the stay then came before HHJ Simpkiss. GBS was separately represented. Mrs Mazur and Mr Stuart again argued that the claim had been issued in breach of the LSA 2007. HHJ Simpkiss accepted that there was no continuing issue of breach and relied in part on the SRA’s confirmation that Mr Middleton had authority to conduct litigation under Mr Ashall’s supervision. He therefore lifted the stay and awarded costs to CRS.
Mrs Mazur and Mr Stuart appealed to the High Court. Before Sheldon J, the arguments shifted. The SRA no longer maintained the position it had adopted in its December 2024 letter. Instead, it agreed with the Law Society that section 21(3) did not authorise an employee to conduct litigation and that an unauthorised person could not themselves conduct litigation under the supervision of an authorised solicitor. Sheldon J accepted that analysis and held that section 21(3) merely brought employees of authorised persons within the regulatory framework, it did not make them authorised persons. The judge distinguished between an unauthorised person supporting an authorised solicitor in conducting litigation (which was permissible) and an unauthorised person conducting litigation under the supervision of an authorised solicitor (which was not). He therefore allowed the appeal from HHJ Simpkiss and overturned the costs order made against Mrs Mazur and Mr Stuart.
That was the decision which went to the Court of Appeal. By that stage, what had begun as a relatively ordinary fees claim was a much broader dispute about the meaning of the conduct of litigation, the lawfulness of supervised delegation and the extent to which modern litigation practice had been called into question.
The issue before the Court of Appeal
At its foundation, the appeal concerned the meaning of the words “carry on the conduct of litigation” in the Legal Services Act 2007. The question was whether unauthorised persons working in a law firm or law centre under the supervision of an authorised individual were themselves carrying on the reserved legal activity of the conduct of litigation, such that they would be committing a criminal offence under section 14.
The point mattered because the distinction drawn had immediate operational consequences. Sheldon J had accepted a distinction between supporting an authorised person in conducting litigation (which was lawful) and conducting litigation under the supervision of an authorised person (which was not).
Once expressed in those terms, the problem for practice was obvious. The difference between “supporting” and “conducting under supervision” was neither self-evident nor easy to administer. The effect was to cast doubt on ordinary delegated work across firms, in particular those that employed Chartered Legal Executives. That is why the appeal acquired a significance far beyond the facts which gave rise to it.
Was the judge right to hold that unauthorised persons were carrying on the conduct of litigation if they did acts which constituted the conduct of litigation under the supervision of an authorised individual? The Court of Appeal’s answer is no.
Why the first instance decision caused such difficulty
As set out above, the issue arose from Particulars of Claim being signed by Mr Middleton, who did not hold a practising certificate. GBS’s evidence was that Mr Middleton was supervised by Mr Ashall, a practising solicitor who said he had the conduct of the litigation and who described regular supervision and review.
Mr Middleton was not an authorised person. The real question was whether he was, in law, the person carrying on the reserved activity, or whether he was acting for and on behalf of the authorised individual who remained responsible for the matter.
The Court of Appeal later observed that, once Mr Ashall’s evidence made clear that he had conduct of the litigation and supervised Mr Middleton, it was hard to see why the litigation had continued for as long as it had.
The problem was compounded by the SRA’s shifting position, to which I will return later. In December 2024 the SRA told GBS that its employees were permitted to undertake reserved activities because the firm was authorised and regulated under the LSA 2007 and that Mr Middleton had not conducted a reserved legal activity without entitlement. Later, before Sheldon J, the SRA disavowed that position and aligned itself with the more restrictive approach.
Sheldon J’s judgment accepted the distinction advanced by the Law Society and the SRA between supporting an authorised solicitor and conducting litigation under supervision. That conclusion decision had a “real world impact”, which was noted by the Court of Appeal. The legal sector understood it as deeply disruptive and there was a scramble by regulators to adjust guidance in light of it. Many Chartered Legal Executives lost their jobs, or had their case loads removed from them.
What the Court of Appeal decided
The Court of Appeal said, in terms, that the role of an unauthorised person is not limited merely to assisting or supporting an authorised individual.
It is not unlawful for an unauthorised person to act for and on behalf of an authorised individual so as to conduct litigation under their supervision, provided the authorised individual puts in place appropriate arrangements for the supervision of and delegation to that person.
This appears most clearly in paragraphs 25 to 27 of the judgment and again in the formal conclusions at paragraph 187 of the judgment. Lady Justice Andrews’ short concurring judgment at paragraph 198 expresses the same point in practical language.
What the Court meant by “carry on the conduct of litigation”
What the Court meant by ‘carry on the conduct of litigation’ appears in paragraphs 21, 162, 170 and 187 of the judgment. The Court of Appeal holds that the words “conduct of litigation” refer to the tasks to be undertaken. The words “carry on” refer to the direction and control of and responsibility for those tasks.
That analysis separates the performance of a task from the legal question of who is carrying on the reserved activity. If an unauthorised person issues proceedings or serves a document for and on behalf of an authorised individual who retains responsibility, that does not mean the unauthorised person is carrying on the conduct of litigation. The authorised individual remains the person who does so.
This clarified that the performance of a reserved task and the carrying on of a reserved legal activity are not always the same thing. It is possible for one person to perform the task and another, in law, to be the person who carries on the activity because that other person retains the requisite direction, control and responsibility.
That point also explains why the appeal could not be resolved simply by listing tasks and asking who physically performed them. The deeper question was who bore the relevant responsibility.
Why the Court looked at the older authorities
One of the strengths of the judgment is that it does not treat the Legal Services Act 2007 as though it arrived in a vacuum. In reaching their decision, the Court of Appeal goes back to the Victorian authorities, then through the 1974 and 1990 Acts and then to the pre-2007 case law.
There had long been a widespread and regulated practice of delegation by solicitors to unqualified staff and that practice had been recognised by the courts. The Court of Appeal says plainly that Parliament must be taken to have understood this when enacting the LSA 2007.
Waterlow is central to that analysis. The House of Lords there recognised that statutory provisions requiring work to be done by qualified solicitors did not necessarily require the solicitor to do every act personally. The act could be done in the solicitor’s name by a competent agent without the agent incurring the penalty.
The same is true of Myers v Elman. Delegation did not absolve the solicitor of responsibility. The machinery of justice worked through clerks and other staff, but the duty remained the solicitor’s. That aligns with the Court of Appeal’s conclusion that delegation is lawful because responsibility remains with the authorised individual.
The court also placed some weight on an article from June 1946 entitled “The Duties and Responsibilities of a Managing Clerk”, which appeared in The Solicitors’ Managing Clerks’ Gazette, which described itself as The Official Organ of the Solicitors’ Managing Clerks’ Association on managing clerks. That article recognised both retained control by principals and the reality that clerks sometimes had to act without prior instructions where circumstances required it. The Court used it to show that the more rigid model of universal prior approval had no convincing basis in the profession’s actual practice.
When considering 1990 Legal Services Act authorities, Hollins is relied on to demonstrate that solicitors had always been able to delegate part of their functions in appropriate cases to appropriate people, subject to proper supervision and retained professional responsibility. Agassi is authority for the narrow construction of the penal prohibition. Since the offence provisions carry criminal consequences, the definition of the conduct of litigation is not to be inflated beyond what the statutory language properly supports. That narrow approach carries forward into section 14 of the LSA 2007.
The LSA 2007 did not silently criminalise ordinary supervised practice
The Court of Appeal’s treatment of Parliament’s intention is one of the most important parts of the judgment. It says that the LSA 2007 was not intended to and did not make a significant change from the 1990 Act in relation to the offence provisions. The Act was liberalising in relation to regulatory structures and was not intended to create a dramatic new category of criminal exposure for ordinary supervised work in law firms and law centres.
That conclusion matters because the more restrictive reading below would have implied a major extension of criminal liability without clear statutory language and against the background of long-established professional practice. The Court of Appeal held that Parliament must be taken to have understood the widespread and regulated practice of delegation by solicitors to unauthorised staff. There was nothing in the text of the LSA 2007 or the preparatory material to indicate an intention to abolish or curtail that practice.
The Court of Appeal also connects this to the regulatory objectives in section 1 of LSA 2007. Undermining delegation would run counter to the objectives including access to justice, the interests of consumers, competition and the encouragement of a diverse and effective profession.
Delegation, supervision and responsibility
The Court of Appeal does not say that anything can be delegated in any way, so long as an authorised person exists somewhere in the background. It says that an unauthorised person may perform any task within the scope of the conduct of litigation for and on behalf of an authorised individual, provided the authorised individual retains responsibility and has put in place proper arrangements for direction, management, supervision and control.
Paragraph 26 of the Judgment is especially important because it explains what retained responsibility means. It is not only formal responsibility for the delegated task, it also includes the professional responsibilities identified in section 1(3) of the LSA 2007: acting with independence and integrity, maintaining proper standards of work, acting in the client’s best interests and complying with the duty to the court.
No requirement of universal prior approval
The Law Society’s original submission drew the boundary in a rigid place. An unauthorised person could prepare a claim form, but could not issue proceedings without prior approval by the authorised individual. The SRA sought to qualify that by accepting that in highly controlled, routine situations, some proceedings might be commenced without the authorised individual seeing every document in advance. The Law Society then adopted that qualification.
The judgment’s answer is that the LSA 2007 does not require universal prior approval. Some situations will require a high degree of control and some routine situations may not. In routine work, regular meetings and sampling may be enough. The level of supervision is fact-sensitive and is properly left to the regulators. What the court rejects is the proposition that the statute itself imposes a rigid prior-approval model.
That part of the judgment is likely to be of immediate operational importance. Firms do not need to restructure on the assumption that every issue, service step or filing must be individually approved in advance by an authorised person on pain of criminal liability, but they do need to be able to demonstrate that the authorised individual genuinely retains responsibility and that the systems of supervision are real rather than nominal.
Ndole and Baxter
The treatment of Ndole and Baxter is likely to be one of the most cited aspects of the judgment because those cases had come to bear more weight in professional discussion than they could properly carry.
The Court says that Ndole and Baxter were cases about unauthorised persons acting for litigants in person. In that context, there is no authorised person with power to delegate and retain responsibility. A litigant in person has a personal right to conduct litigation and that right cannot be delegated to an unauthorised third party.
That is why the “fact and degree” analysis in those cases is different in kind from the situation in Mazur. In Ndole, the question was whether the unauthorised person was merely carrying out a mechanical step or had assumed responsibility for service. In Baxter, the same inquiry arose in the litigant-in-person context. The Court of Appeal says expressly that Baxter has been misunderstood and that it did not expand the scope of the conduct of litigation, it merely applied the Ndole analysis in its own context.
This is an important correction. It means that Ndole and Baxter are not the foundation for a broad prohibition on supervised delegated work in ordinary authorised practice.
Sections 14, 15, 16 and 21(3) of LSA 2007
Section 21(3) LSA 2007 defines “regulated persons”. It includes employees of authorised persons within the scope of a regulator’s rule-making power. The Court of Appeal makes clear that this does not make those employees authorised persons. That is why the SRA’s December 2024 letter was wrong when it suggested otherwise.
Sections 15 and 16 LSA 2007 were relied on in argument to suggest that both employer and employee must be entitled where the employee carries on a reserved legal activity. The Court’s answer is that those provisions do not assist in the present scenario, because on the Court’s construction the unauthorised employee is not carrying on the conduct of litigation when acting for and on behalf of the authorised individual, so sections 15 and 16 are not engaged.
What actually counts as the conduct of litigation
The Court of Appeal does not attempt to provide an exhaustive definition, it says openly that it cannot provide a comprehensive list of all tasks that fall within or outside the conduct of litigation. That is probably right, as any attempt at an exhaustive classification would likely have generated further disputes.
The Court of Appeal does, however, offer useful guidance. Issuing proceedings is plainly within the conduct of litigation. Ancillary functions are limited to formal steps such as service of statements of case. The second limb, dealing with the commencement, prosecution and defence of proceedings, is less clear and is not fully resolved on the appeal.
Paragraph 193 of the judgment is likely to be relied upon repeatedly. There, the Court identifies categories of work which are unlikely to fall within the statutory definition, including pre-litigation work, legal advice in connection with proceedings, correspondence with the opposing party, gathering evidence, instructing and liaising with experts and counsel, signing a statement of truth and signing other documents the CPR permits a legal representative to sign. That part of the judgment will be practically valuable, even though the Court presents it cautiously.
Law centres, supervised fee earners and access to justice
The Law Centres Network intervened because the first instance decision threatened models of practice that depend on supervised but unauthorised staff carrying their own caseloads under the oversight of authorised lawyers. The Court’s treatment of the third issue is brief because it says the answer follows from the first. In practical terms, however, the point is important. The court’s reasoning preserves the law centres model because the same principles of delegation and retained responsibility apply there as elsewhere.
This matters for access to justice more generally. The Court repeatedly treats the regulatory objectives in section 1 of the LSA 2007 as important context, in that it refers to access to justice, consumer interests, competition and a diverse and effective profession. The Court expressly says that undermining the practice of delegation would run counter to those objectives.
For practitioners, the economics and organisation of litigation practice, especially in routine, volume and publicly funded work, depend on lawful supervised delegation. The Court of Appeal recognised that reality without treating it as a reason to bend the statute. It is rather treated it as part of the context in which the statute must be understood.
The SRA’s position on the appeal
The judgment invites some measured consideration of the SRA’s role in this litigation. The Court of Appeal’s own language is fair, but it is plainly critical in places.
The difficulty was not merely that the SRA argued a case and lost, as this is routine for regulators. The concern is that, in a case involving the scope of a criminal prohibition under section 14 of the Legal Services Act 2007, the SRA’s position shifted in a way that left the lower courts and the profession dealing with uncertainty that ought to have been avoided.
The sequence of events is important. In its letter of 2 December 2024, the SRA told GBS that its employees were permitted to undertake reserved activities because the firm was authorised and regulated under the LSA 2007 and that Mr Middleton had not conducted a reserved legal activity without entitlement. The Court of Appeal later said that this was wrong in law and also recorded that the SRA later reversed its own position on section 21(3).
The SRA’s later position before the appellate courts was different, but it did not resolve the problem. The regulator opposed the broader CILEX appeal and supported the argument that an unauthorised person could not themselves carry on the conduct of litigation under supervision in the sense contended for by CILEX. THE SRA submissions were broadly that the LSA 2007 prohibited an unauthorised person from being the person who exercises professional judgment in relation to litigation and assumes substantive responsibility for it. The SRA did introduce an important qualification, in that it accepted that, in tightly controlled systems for routine work such as simple debt claims, some proceedings might be commenced by unauthorised staff without an offence being committed, even if the authorised individual had not seen every document in advance. However, that qualification exposed its weakness, in that once it was accepted that an unauthorised person might perform the formal act without specific prior approval and yet no offence would be committed, the real legal question was plainly where responsibility lay. That was the question the Court of Appeal answered in CILEX’s favour.
The Court of Appeal’s own observations bear repeating. It said that the lower courts were faced with “shifting sands and arguments that were wrong and later abandoned”. It also said that the SRA’s letter of 2 December 2024, relied on by HHJ Simpkiss, was wrong in law. Those observations justify concern, because they reveal an unsatisfactory degree of instability in the regulator’s approach to an issue of obvious practical and legal importance.
That concern becomes sharper when one remembers the subject matter. The issue was not a narrow procedural disagreement, it was whether ordinary supervised practices across firms, CILEX practices and law centres might expose unauthorised staff and potentially others, to criminal liability and contempt. In that context, the profession was entitled to expect clarity and consistency from the principal regulator. The Court of Appeal’s judgment shows that those expectations were not met.
A fair reading of the position is therefore this. The SRA was right to emphasise that responsibility for the conduct of litigation must remain with an authorised individual and the Court of Appeal agreed with that in substance. But the regulator was wrong to support the restrictive legal framework, wrong earlier to rely on section 21(3) as if it answered the issue and left the courts confronting a question that should have been presented more clearly and coherently from the outset. That is a matter which practitioners are entitled to notice and one which ought to inform future regulatory guidance in this area.
There is a further practical point. The Court records that the profession and regulators alike had to adjust guidance and working assumptions in response to the first instance judgment. Where the issue is the scope of a criminal offence in routine legal practice, that kind of instability carries a cost of its own, it disrupts working models, diverts compliance effort and creates unnecessary anxiety for firms and staff who may suddenly be told that long-settled practice is unlawful.
The Court of Appeal has now corrected the law, but the wider lesson is that regulators should be especially careful before advancing interpretations that unsettle established practice in this way, particularly where the statutory language does not clearly compel the result for which they contend.
What practitioners should now take from the judgment
The practical question for firms is not whether an unauthorised person ever performs a task within the conduct of litigation. The real question is whether the authorised individual is genuinely the person carrying on the litigation through retained responsibility, oversight and control.
That means supervision structures matter. In routine work, systems and sampling may suffice, but in more sensitive work, closer review and prior approval may be necessary. The judgment leaves that operational detail to the regulators, but the direction is clear enough.
Lady Justice Andrews’ short concurring judgment at paragraph 198 is very useful here:
“I agree. In essence, the question in any given set of circumstances will be whether the unauthorised person, in carrying out whatever tasks which fall within the scope of “conduct of litigation” have been delegated to him or her, is in truth acting on behalf of the authorised individual. If they are, it is the authorised individual who is conducting the litigation. But if the reality is that the litigation is not being conducted by the unauthorised person for and on behalf of the authorised individual, they will be committing an offence. That is a practical test which firms and compliance teams can actually use.”
The judgment should therefore prompt a careful look at supervision. Firms that already operate disciplined supervision models will feel reassured by the decision. Firms with looser arrangements would be unwise to treat the judgment as a comfort blanket.
Why this judgment matters
The Court of Appeal has restored something that should not have ever needed restoring, namely a coherent understanding of supervised delegation in litigation practice.
It also restores clarity to the role of authorised individuals. The person carrying on the reserved activity is the person who retains direction, control and responsibility, both formally and professionally. The unauthorised person who acts for and on behalf of that individual under proper arrangements does not thereby commit an offence.
That is why the judgment matters. It clarifies the law, removes a serious practical uncertainty and reasserts a distinction that had been lost after the previous decision.
It also leaves behind a fair but uncomfortable question about how such uncertainty was allowed to take hold for so long in an area where the consequences of getting the law wrong were so obvious.
For practitioners, the decision is worth reading in full. For regulators, it should also be enough to prompt some care when questions of reserved activity arise against the background of long-settled professional practice.
For those who have spent the last year trying to reconcile the first instance reasoning with the realities of litigation work, the Court of Appeal has now supplied the answer. Where responsibility, direction and control remain with the authorised individual, the authorised individual is the one carrying on the conduct of litigation.
