Compliance & Regulation

A solicitor jailed for 26 months last year for using drug money generated by his twin brother to pay a mortgage has been struck off.

The Court of Appeal hearing the Mazur case will have to decide between statutory interpretation and “the contextual argument”, the solicitor bringing the appeal said last week.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has levied fines totalling £550,000 in the past three months on law firms that breached basic anti-money laundering rules.

The Bar Council and Bar Standards Board are looking to increase the cost of practising for barristers by 4% in the coming year, with a new band for those earning £2m.

There has been a 24% spike in reports about barristers to their regulator this year, according to new figures from the Bar Standards Board.

Safeguarding the wellbeing of those facing enforcement action should be part of legal regulators’ duty to support equality and diversity, the Legal Services Board said yesterday.

The number of law firms in England and Wales has dipped below 9,000 for the first time in recent memory after dropping by nearly 2,000 over the past 15 years.

The SRA needs to provide urgent advice on how artificial intelligence can be used in litigation in compliance with the Mazur ruling, the Law Society has said.

The Court of Appeal has granted CILEX permission to appeal against the Mazur judgment, saying it “raises an important point of practice”.

The “chaos” caused by the Mazur ruling demands “a courageous, full-scale review of the regulatory framework” in response, the chair of the Legal Services Consumer Panel has argued.