Innovating Legal Education and Practice

Chris Kenny

Chief Executive, Legal Services Board

Chris Kenny is the inaugural Chief Executive of the Legal Services Board. The Legal Services Board is a new organisation, created by the Legal Services Act 2007. Its overriding mandate is to ensure that regulation in the legal services sector is carried out in the public interest; and that the interests of consumers are placed at the heart of the system. The Board itself is responsible for overseeing legal regulators in England and Wales. It is independent of Government and of the legal profession. It oversees ten separate bodies, the Approved Regulators, which themselves regulate the circa 120,000 lawyers practising throughout the jurisdiction. The Board will also oversee the new organisation being established to handle consumer complaints about lawyers, the Office for Legal Complaints.

Chris’s early career was in the Department of Health and the Treasury, where he held a variety of policy and management posts including Principal Private Secretary to the Secretary of State. As Oftel's Director of Regulatory Policy and then Director of Compliance between 2000 and 2003, he worked on access and competition issues and worked with industry and consumer bodies to establish the Telecoms Ombudsman. Most recently, as Director of Life and Pensions for the Association of British Insurers, he led the industry's input into the work of the Pensions Commission and the Government's response to it and worked with Lord Hunt of Wirral on the independent review of the Financial Ombudsman Service. Chris has also held non-executive posts in the NHS and third sector.