Richard Moorhead nails it again in his blog:

US scandals (Watergate, Savings and Loan, Enron and latterly Lehman) have tended to prompt the question: where were the lawyers? Indeed, Watergate is widely credited with being the first crisis to prompt a flourishing of legal ethics scholarship. Interestingly, this has not tended to happen in the UK. Solicitors have tended to avoid the controversy surrounding corporate scandals. The reasons for that are for another time but there is also a possibility that Hackgate might be about to change that. Certainly lawyers are being dragged in from the shadows and onto the stage of this particular story.

Richard goes on to explore the details.

Of course, the apparently smaller role is in part the because of the lesser political role of lawyers in British political life.