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Law firms should be at the forefront of the fight against modern slavery, both in terms of their own impact as businesses and advising clients on meeting their human rights obligations, the Law Society has urged.

A partner has been struck off after forging a divorce client’s decree absolute, and misappropriating more than £200,000 from clients to hide his inactivity on other matters. The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal said his motivation was “to conceal his professional failings in respect of other clients”.

The body representing chartered legal executives has called on the profession to end discrimination against lawyers who have qualified through non-university routes and open up the senior judiciary to those entered the law by alternative means.

More than four years after it was meant to happen, implementation of the much-delayed Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates (QASA) is still stuck, while the profession awaits the government’s decision on whether it will set up an overlapping panel of defence advocates, Legal Futures can report.

Freeing up the rules on licensing alternative business structures will help the Solicitors Regulation Authority deal with more complex applications, such as those from businesses that form part of a group or have private equity investment, it has told the government.

A law firm and solicitor found to have sexually discriminated against a student who worked there for six weeks have lost their appeal against the £14,000 award for injury to feelings. In her interview, the solicitor “jokingly” asked her to marry him, and commented on her figure.

Two barristers from the same chambers have between them accounted for more than one in ten of the four hundred plus new complaints made against their branch of the profession in 2015/16. The revelation came amid a crisis of public confidence in the fairness of the BSB’s complaints process.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has cleared two solicitors of being unwitting parties to a mortgage fraud, saying that once the mortgagor’s solicitor had been sanctioned in 2015, the Solicitors Regulation Authority should not have continued its case against them as the purchaser’s advisers.

Solicitors may have a regulatory obligation to question the ethics of what their clients are doing or proposing to do, a leading academic has suggested. Dr Steven Vaughan said the new SRA Competence Statement required solicitors to be alive to ethical issues “which are far wider than their own professional responsibility obligations”.

A firm of solicitors has been caught up in the activities of two companies that have been wound up by the High Court after it ruled that they showed a “lack of commercial probity” in their sale of interests in American oil wells.