Home » New SRA Supervision Guidance post-Mazur: What’s Changed, and Why Culture Is the Real Test

New SRA Supervision Guidance post-Mazur: What's Changed, and Why Culture Is the Real Test

June 16, 2026

Anne Austin

Director

On 12 June 2026, the Solicitors Regulation Authority published substantially expanded guidance on effective supervision – growing from nine pages to twenty-four.

The update follows the Court of Appeal’s ruling in CILEX v Mazur & Others, a case that has dominated discussion in the legal press for much of this year and which directly affects how firms can structure delegation to paralegals, legal executives, and other unauthorised staff.

If your firm relies on non-solicitor staff to carry out litigation work – and most firms of any size do – this guidance is not one to file away unread. It sets out, in far more detail than before, what the SRA expects “proper direction, management supervision and control” to actually look like in practice.

What prompted the change

The background is the long-running Mazur litigation. Earlier this year, the Court of Appeal considered the meaning of “conduct of litigation” – one of the six reserved legal activities under the Legal Services Act 2007 – and clarified that an unauthorised person, such as a paralegal, legal executive, or trainee solicitor, can lawfully carry out tasks within the conduct of litigation, provided this is done on behalf of, and under the direction and control of, an authorised person.

Crucially, the Court held that it is the authorised individual – typically the supervising solicitor – who retains responsibility for those tasks and who is treated as carrying on the conduct of litigation. The ruling overturned an earlier, more restrictive High Court position and was generally regarded across the profession as bringing welcome clarity, even if some uncertainty remains about how it applies in practice.

The SRA had been expected to respond for some time. Its updated guidance was developed in consultation with the Law Society, CILEX Regulation, the Legal Aid Agency, the Law Centres Network and other bodies, and represents the regulator’s attempt to translate the Court’s ruling into practical expectations for firms.

What has actually changed

The headline shift is one of principle. The SRA’s previous position was that unauthorised individuals could only support an authorised lawyer conducting litigation – essentially, assist but not act. The revised guidance moves to a more permissive position: non-authorised staff can lawfully carry out tasks that fall within the conduct of litigation itself, provided the arrangements around them are sound.

Beyond that central change, several other elements are worth firms’ attention:

Systems and processes count as supervision. The guidance recognises that supervision can be delivered through structured case management systems and defined work processes, not only through direct, file-by-file oversight – provided there are clear escalation routes and the supervisor retains genuine oversight of how matters progress.
Documented rationale is now expected. Firms are expected to record their reasoning when designing supervision arrangements, systems, controls and delegation structures, so they can justify these if challenged – a theme that will be familiar to anyone who has been through a compliance audit recently.
New case studies, including on AI. The guidance includes worked examples of compliant and non-compliant supervision arrangements – including, for the first time, a section on the use of AI tools, making clear that an authorised individual must remain accountable for any AI-assisted or AI-generated work.
Claims management gets extra emphasis. For firms relying on the FCA authorisation exemption for claims management work, the guidance reiterates the statutory requirement for both supervision and direction from a regulated practitioner in the same organisation.

In short: the principle has loosened, but the evidential bar has risen. Firms have more flexibility in how they structure delegation, but considerably more is now expected in terms of demonstrating that the structure actually works.

How the profession has responded

Coverage that we have seen has been measured and broadly positive in tone, while flagging that important questions remain about how the new framework will play out in practice.

The dominant theme across reporting on the update is relief – relief that, after months of uncertainty following the original Mazur litigation, the SRA has finally set out a detailed, practical framework, developed in consultation with the Law Society, CILEX Regulation and other representative bodies. The regulator has clearly tried to give firms more to work with: more case studies, more explanation of how delegation can be structured, and an acknowledgement that the period of uncertainty had been a difficult one for the profession to navigate. Representative bodies have broadly welcomed the result, while being candid that some areas of the underlying Mazur judgment remain less than fully settled.

Alongside that relief, however, there’s a healthy strand of scepticism running through the commentary. In our view, it’s the right instinct to have. The reassurance that “the lawyer always remains in control” is, on paper, the foundation the whole framework rests on. But whether that’s true in practice depends entirely on what individual firms do with the guidance, not on the guidance itself. A 24-page document can describe what good supervision looks like in granular detail; it cannot make a supervisor with a full caseload actually find the time to review a paralegal’s file. The gap between principle and practice is exactly where this guidance will be tested.

Our reading is that firms are right to be cautiously optimistic rather than uncritically positive. The clarity is genuinely welcome – firms now have a far more detailed picture of what “proper direction, management supervision and control” means than they did even a few months ago. But clarity in a regulatory document and clarity on the ground are two different things, and the firms that benefit most from this guidance will be the ones that treat it as a prompt to review their actual supervision arrangements now, rather than as a box that has already been ticked simply because a framework exists.

What this means in practice for firms

For firms that rely on paralegals, legal executives, or trainees to progress litigation matters – which, in our experience, describes the majority of SRA-regulated firms outside the largest practices – the practical questions raised by this guidance are not new in kind, but they are now considerably sharper in focus:

Can you demonstrate, in writing, how tasks are delegated and why the level of supervision attached to them is appropriate to the risk involved?
If your supervision relies on a case management system or standard process rather than file-by-file review, is that system actually being used as intended, and would you be able to evidence that if asked?
Where a supervisor has their own fee-earning caseload, is the time genuinely available to review supervisees’ work meaningfully, or has supervision quietly become something that happens “every few months” – the exact arrangement the SRA’s guidance singles out as ineffective?
If AI tools are used anywhere in your litigation workflow, is there a clear point at which an authorised person reviews and takes responsibility for the output?

None of these questions require firms to overhaul their business model. What they do require is a documented, risk-based thinking that the SRA’s case studies repeatedly point to – the difference, in the regulator’s own examples, between a firm referred to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal and one whose arrangements were considered sound, often came down to whether the rationale for the supervision model had been thought through and recorded, not simply whether a supervisor existed on paper.

The takeaway

This guidance gives firms more room to structure delegation in a way that reflects how they actually work – but it also raises the evidential bar for showing that those arrangements are effective, not merely present. As with so much SRA guidance, the gap that tends to get firms into difficulty is not the absence of a policy, but the gap between what the policy says and what happens on a day-to-day basis at file level.

If you would like an objective view on whether your firm’s current supervision and delegation arrangements would stand up to scrutiny under the new guidance – particularly where paralegals, legal executives or trainees are involved in litigation work – we would be happy to talk this through.