Compliance & Regulation

A solicitor and former councillor jailed for housing fraud has accepted that he must now be struck off the roll. The former Duncan Lewis lawyer had been sentenced to 16 months.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has stepped up its probe of solicitors who acted for the Post Office during the sub-postmasters’ scandal, it has emerged.

A solicitor suspended for a year after a tribunal ruled he had acted dishonestly in signing a declaration on behalf of one of his firm’s directors has successfully challenged the decision.

Plans for major shake-up of the rules of the Legal Ombudsman, including reducing the time limit to bring complaints from six years to one, have been unveiled.

A law firm which specialises in the recovery of unpaid parking fines has been fined £15,000 for delays in investigating unallocated payments from debtors totalling nearly £130,000 at one point.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has called for any new internal fining powers for the Solicitors Regulation Authority to be limited to £7,000, rather than the proposed £25,000.

The barrister reprimanded for describing his opponent’s instructing lawyer as a “hysterical woman” says he is being “persecuted for expressing inconvenient truths”.

The Law Society has backed a “moderate” increase in the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s fining powers to between £5,000 to £7,500, rather than its proposed £25,000.

A non-lawyer owner of a law firm that has been hugely successful in running PPI claims has been banned from working for ABSs after he made secret profits from it.

The Legal Ombudsman will publish its decisions in full, but not until “operational stability” has been achieved, it has emerged.