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A solicitor who made withdrawals from a client’s bank accounts under powers of attorney that had been terminated, has accepted the maximum penalty that the Solicitors Regulation Authority can impose without referring him to a disciplinary tribunal.

Big law firms will be using predictive analytics and artificial intelligence not only to predict where growth in services will be, but also which clients and cases are worth pursuing, according to PwC’s vision of the law firm of the future that also foresaw digital robots taking over “routine and standard human transactions”.

Artificial intelligence has been used to predict decisions of the European Court of Human Rights to 79% accuracy. Researchers at University College London, the University of Sheffield and the University of Pennsylvania developed the method to analyse case text automatically using a machine learning algorithm.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has struck off a partner for dishonestly misappropriating funds from deceaseds’ estates and in one case overcharging by almost 1,000%. He admitted that the ledger given to the SRA was “a work of fiction” and that he had spent two or three days preparing it.

A solicitor involved in conveyancing transactions that resulted in the non-payment of £2m in stamp duty land tax has accepted a rebuke from the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Now defunct Leeds firm Dixon Law Solicitors acted in 47 transactions over two and a half years that used two SDLT avoidance schemes,

Solicitors’ professional indemnity insurers paid out around £2bn due to negligence claims in the 10 years to 2014, startling new figures released yesterday by the Solicitors Regulation Authority revealed. The regulator said that around 142,000 claims were made in that decade, one in five of which was successful.

An ex-solicitor has been found guilty and jailed for five years for five counts of fraud by false representation after he hijacked a law firm’s identity – his second spell in jail for fraud after he previously stole from his own firm’s client account. The conviction came at the end of an 11-day trial.

Placing law firms’ complaints data and insurance claims in the public domain are among the “initial ideas” published today by the Solicitors Regulation Authority to improve transparency in the legal market – but it is not currently planning to mandate firms to publish prices.

The High Court has granted insurance company LV= permission to bring committal proceedings against solicitors from a defunct law firm after two starkly contrasting medical reports emerged in a road traffic case they were handling.

Solicitors who ceded control of their firms to non-lawyers – in one instance they claimed their practice had been taken over by a criminal gang – have been sanctioned by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. In the first case, it struck off three partners following mortgage frauds that have already cost the profession nearly £3m.