A judge refused to hear a chartered legal executive who had the right to be heard
On the best estimate this site can make, around 670 chartered legal executives do Court of Protection work. No CILEX authorisation mentions that court. When the regulator asked the court which of its authorisations applied, it waited five months to be told the answer was its own.
In its report to the CILEx Regulation board of 16 April 2026, the regulator’s Director of Policy and Governance listed the problems that had surfaced since it published guidance for members working in the Court of Protection. The first was this:
A Court of Protection Judge denied a CLE with Rights of Audience to exercise their rights to conduct advocacy based on advice received from the President’s Office of the CoP. The advice to the Judge confirmed that CILEX Fellows were unable to gain rights of audience as this was reserved for Solicitors and Barristers.
The advice was wrong. CILEx Regulation is an approved regulator empowered to grant rights of audience, and the person standing in that courtroom had been granted them. The register this site publishes lists every current holder by name and date of authorisation; the earliest still in force was authorised on 1 July 2010.
What makes the entry worth more than a paragraph is that it was not an isolated misunderstanding by one judge. It was the President’s Office of the Court of Protection, advising a judge, that a whole profession did not have a right that profession has held for eighteen years. And eighteen months after the question was first raised, the part of it that matters most is still open.
How many people this concerns
The register carries 30 distinct practising-right names — litigator and advocate, in civil, criminal and family flavours, some restricted to the judge’s room. Not one of them says Court of Protection.
It was very nearly otherwise. CILEX’s 2023 consultation on new professional titles proposed a set of non-reserved specialism titles, and the list put to its board on 29 November 2023 included Court of Protection alongside Mental Health, Coronial and fourteen others. Respondents warned that a long list would confuse people, so it was cut to the six reserved areas in which practice rights can be held. Everyone else became, simply, “CILEX Chartered Lawyer”. That was a defensible simplification. Two years later the regulator was writing to a court to ask which of the six a Court of Protection practitioner should hold.
So the question of how many people do that work cannot be answered from the authorisation data. It can be answered, approximately, from the practitioners’ own firms. Of 11,603 people on the two CILEX registers, this site found published firm-website profiles for 2,534, and 242 of those profiles list Court of Protection among the person’s practice areas.
Restricted to the 7,727 on the regulator’s practitioner register — the people for whom practice rights are a live question — it is 188 of the 1,923 with a profile, or 9.8%.
That sample is not random: firms that publish staff profiles are not the same firms as those that do not. The measurable part of that bias is firm size, and it is real — people with a findable profile are over-represented at employers with 10 to 24 CILEX staff (29% against 19%) and under-represented at employers where they are the only one (9% against 19%). Re-weighting the rate to the register’s own firm-size mix moves it from 9.8% to 9.5%, which is to say the bias barely matters here.
| With a named employer | Profiled | List Court of Protection | Re-weighted rate | Implied | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Practitioners | 7,043 | 1,923 | 188 | 9.5% | ~670 |
| Paralegals | 3,226 | 611 | 53 | 7.8% | ~250 |
Roughly one chartered legal executive in eleven does work in a court whose relationship to their licence nobody could state.
Eighteen months of asking
The paper trail is unusually complete, because it runs through board papers that CILEx Regulation publishes.
| 21 Oct 2025 | The executive agrees to “circulate advice relating to the Court of Protection” |
| Nov 2025 | Guidance published: seek litigation rights through the Civil or Family pathway, depending on the work |
| Dec 2025 | “Bespoke guidance” for Court of Protection workers developed jointly with CILEX |
| ~Feb 2026 | CRL asks the Court of Protection President’s Office for clarification |
| 16 Apr 2026 | The judge refusal is reported to the board, with two further problems |
| Jul 2026 | “Engagement with the Court of Protection has proved challenging.” The MoJ brokers contact |
| late Jul 2026 | After five months, a reply: deciding which rights apply “rests with CRL” |
| 4 Sep 2026 | CRL meets members who have organised themselves as the “Court of Protection Collective” |
One line in the regulator’s 2025 education report is worth keeping. The two routes to authorisation that CILEX members in the Court of Protection were eventually offered were designed, it says, “working in partnership with the self-appointed Head of the LinkedIn Group”. A support group that the practitioners set up themselves, on LinkedIn, became the body the regulator worked through. That is a fair measure of how much formal machinery existed for them: none. | open | Whether Higher Rights of Audience are needed for some hearings |
The reply, when it came, is the part to sit with. A regulator had asked a court: which of our authorisations do our members need in order to appear in front of you, and does the work they do there even count as conducting litigation? Five months later the court’s answer was that this is the regulator’s decision. Which is legally orthodox — it is the approved regulator’s job to define its own authorisations — and leaves the practitioner who was refused audience exactly where they started, because the person who refused them was the court.
The two problems underneath
The April board paper listed two more, and they have not been reported anywhere else:
There are a number of roles within CoP where members claim they are required to hold litigation practice rights but are unable to demonstrate knowledge of either Civil or Family Law and, therefore, meet our approval criteria.
The guidance told Court of Protection practitioners to qualify through the Civil or Family pathway. Some of them cannot, because the work they actually do is neither. They are being told to walk through a door that does not open from where they are standing.
It is the same shape as a complaint the regulator heard in its second consultation on standalone litigation rights, which ran from 29 July to 9 September 2025 and drew 34 responses. One of them put it plainly: “The requirement to have advocacy experience in order to qualify for rights of audience creates a paradox — how can one gain advocacy experience without first having the rights to conduct advocacy?”
A proportion of CLEs with CoP roles are employed within Local Authorities and there appears to be some confusion over what legal activities they can be authorised to [undertake].
Local-authority lawyers are a large and invisible part of this profession, and the register shows how large. Taken together, local government employs 923 people across the two registers, spread over 242 separate councils — 701 of them authorised practitioners. The largest single employer of chartered legal executives anywhere, Irwin Mitchell, has 141.
The six
The question still unresolved is whether Higher Rights of Audience are required for certain Court of Protection hearings.
If the answer is yes, the number of chartered legal executives lawfully able to conduct those hearings is six — the entire national stock of higher-rights advocates in this profession, the earliest authorised in April 2025. Against roughly 670 people doing the work.
That is not a prediction. It is what the register would say on the morning the answer arrived.
What CILEX and CRL would say
Both bodies would point out, correctly, that they have not been idle. CRL published guidance within weeks of the question arising, produced a bespoke version with CILEX, chased the President’s Office through the Ministry of Justice when direct contact failed, met the practitioners who organised, and is now openly considering whether “a specialist authorisation pathway for Court of Protection work should be developed.” Its chief executive told the board in July that “the lack of substantive response from the Court of Protection is becoming a bigger issue for CRL and CILEX members working in this area” — which is a regulator saying out loud that it is being ignored.
The criticism is not that nobody acted. It is that a profession of 7,727 authorised practitioners contains around 670 people whose daily work sits in a court that, for a year, could not be told which licence they needed — and that the first anyone outside a board meeting learned of a judge refusing to hear one of them was a bullet point in a published PDF that nobody had read.
Sources: CILEx Regulation board papers, 21 October 2025 to 17 September 2026, among the 2,236 documents the two CILEX bodies publish; the CILEX and CILEx Regulation registers as at September 2026; 2,534 firm-website practitioner profiles collected by this site.
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