I think I'm a pretty representative case when I look at what promises to be a year dominated by the Legal Services Act (LSA) and conclude that the profession has now well and truly reached a point of regulatory overload.

Take one prominent example: the recently-launched, horribly-complicated and wide-reaching review of legal education. On the launch of the initiative many said it was long overdue. Well, start digging into the process as we do for this week's analysis, and another view starts to emerge.

The education market is actually working pretty well, has been subject to relentless tinkering in recent years and at the vocational stage is generally viewed as having improved, by City firms at least. And this is even before you get into whether it is worth starting a review with the implementation of the LSA and a huge shake up of university funding on the way.

But the education review is just one example of a process that has swiftly gotten out of hand. Regulatory fiddling has grown like weeds in the hospitable climate of Tesco law. We've also swiftly moved from one extreme to the other. Not that long ago legal bodies couldn't change their letterheads without kicking it around for five years – now they pump out policy documents like they're going out of style.

All the time the repeated refrain is for engagement with the profession, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the profession is sitting there bewildered and occasionally resentful. Actually, forget the lawyers, I'm a professional anorak – paid to revel in the detail of the legal services market – and I can't keep up with this stuff.

In many ways the process by which the Clementi report became the LSA illustrates many of the problems of the frenetic policy-making in which governments and regulators now routinely indulge. In identifying some genuine problems, the Clementi report eschewed targeted, surgical solutions in favour of a new framework.

One of the arguments in the report was that the existing framework was too complex – the solution was to create an additional rank of new ones. And in reality those new bodies, jostling for positions in an uncertain new environment, don't always enjoy a very constructive relationship with their older counterparts. At times the result has looked like a regulatory land grab. Not exactly what was intended.

While the intentions behind these initiatives are generally (though not always) laudable, the various bodies and stakeholders need to slow the pace of reform and start resisting the temptation for another root-and-branch review. The roots and branches have been reviewed to death, it's time to start worrying about the leaves. The alternative is continued unsustainable levels of policy-making, which will inevitably pile complexity upon complexity. Sometimes, the urge to do something should be resisted.