We called it a mirage. It was the biggest change to this profession in decades
This site reported that 2026's ninefold rise in specialist practice rights was mostly re-labelling. It was not. 1,338 of those authorisations went to people who previously held nothing but the base qualification, and the cause is a judgment the regulator's own board papers describe as reshaping its year.
On 23 September this site published “Specialist practice rights did not grow ninefold in 2026”. Its argument was that the apparent surge — 1,656 specialist authorisations against 183 the year before — was an artefact: the two rights driving it were newly named, so the people holding them were presumably existing right-holders re-authorised under a new label. “It did not happen,” it said.
It did happen. Here is the test the article should have run.
Who the new right-holders were before
| Holders of the new right | Total | Held an equivalent right before 2024 | Held only the base qualification |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chartered Legal Executive Litigator (Civil Litigation) | 947 | 3 | 940 |
| Chartered Legal Executive Litigator (Family Litigation) | 409 | 30 | 379 |
| Chartered Legal Executive Litigator (Criminal Litigation) | 30 | 11 | 19 |
Across the three, 1,338 authorisations went to people who had nothing beyond the base Chartered Legal Executive qualification, and 44 went to people who already held an equivalent right. A re-badging exercise would show the opposite.
The original article had every number it needed to run this check and did not run it. It looked at the right names and their first-appearance dates, formed a plausible theory, and stopped.
What actually happened: Mazur
CILEx Regulation’s board papers — among the 2,236 documents the CILEX bodies publish and which this site had not read when the original was written — describe the cause throughout 2025 and 2026.
From the middle of September 2025 the focus has been on setting up processes and managing the substantive increase in the number of litigation practice right applications received following the Mazur judgement.
To the end of 2025, 564 expressions of interest had been received (97 submitted before 3 November 2025), 268 applications had been uploaded and 3 post Mazur litigation practice rights applications approved (the first on 22 December 2025).
By the September 2026 Strategic Risk Register the tally is “Approval of standalone litigation rights at 1100+”. The register this site collected, read a few weeks later, shows 1,338 across the three rights — the same event, counted slightly later and including family and criminal.
The regulator reorganised around it. It delayed its CPD sampling exercise to “focus resource on Mazur related work and avoid bad publicity from CLEs awaiting a decision on authorisation of litigation practice rights being contacted for sampling purposes”. Its communications were, by its own account, mostly about Mazur. The Law Society Gazette headlines cited in its own media log read “Mazur breakthrough as LSB approves litigation rights” and “CILEx Regulation fast-tracks bid for litigation rights as LSB steps in”.
Why this matters more than an ordinary correction
Because of what the original article concluded. It told readers — specifically trade bodies, recruiters, journalists and firms — that anyone measuring growth in specialist practice from this register “will get an answer that is wrong by a factor of five unless they check when each right first appears”.
That advice was itself wrong by a factor of five, in the other direction. Checking when a right first appears is exactly what produced the false conclusion. The check that works is who held what before.
And the thing it dismissed is the most significant change to this profession’s practice rights in decades: roughly a sixth of all authorised practitioners gaining a standalone litigation right inside a year, following a judgment, with the Legal Services Board’s approval.
How this site got it wrong, mechanically
Three failures, and the third is the one worth keeping.
A plausible theory was not tested. New name plus new dates equals re-badge is a reasonable hypothesis and a two-line query would have refuted it.
The regulator’s own account was not consulted. Everything above is in documents that were public the whole time. This site did not read them until it built an index of them six days later, for unrelated reasons.
The error was confident. “It did not happen” is a strong sentence and there was nothing behind it but an inference. Several pieces published here since have carried caveats about coverage and denominators; this one carried none, and it was the one that needed them.
The original article stands on the site with a correction notice at the top, rather than being quietly amended, because a reader who saw it in the last week is entitled to find out that it was wrong from the same page that told them.
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