Regulation

Two family law barristers have set up what is believed to be the first service allowing separating couples to obtain advice from a single legal expert at any point in the process. They are launching The Divorce Surgery as an alternative business structure regulated by the Bar Standards Board later this week.

The Notaries Society is calling on the profession’s regulator, the Faculty Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, to abandon its oversight of the “extremely high risk” activities of probate and conveyancing given the cost needed to do it properly. The society said its ruling council decided last month with “a degree of reluctance” to call for the pull-out.

Unregulated online legal services company Rocket Lawyer has received a waiver to allow practising solicitors to advise its clients, Legal Futures can reveal. Peninsula – the business services giant that owns Croner – has its own waiver, and is highlighting to potential customers the benefits of privilege that come with it, we can also report.

Training law students in emotional competency, and a change in culture, led from the top, in law firms and chambers are among the shifts needed to combat the growing problem of stress in the legal profession, according to a roundtable held in the run-up to Mental Health Awareness Week, which begins today.

The number of qualified accountants’ reports due to rule breaches has fallen by two-thirds since the rules were changed in 2015, but the amount then being investigated for possible rule breaches has tripled, it has emerged. A handful of them have led to regulatory action as a result.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority should investigate whether there are regulatory barriers to law firms that become alternative business structures providing other professional services such as accountancy and surveying, rather than vice versa, a report it commissioned has recommended.

Leading HR company Croner has become the first unregulated business allowed to employ practising solicitors who can advise its clients. The move, facilitated by a waiver issued by the Solicitors Regulation Authority as part of its innovation ‘safe space’, will also allow Croner to offer training contracts.

A partner has been fined £10,000 plus £28,000 costs for being “sloppy, lazy and careless” for acting in conveyances on the instructions of a third party without confirming them with the clients or conducting due diligence on the clients or transaction funds.

A solicitor who claimed that he “unwittingly facilitated” money laundering on behalf of an associate of convicted murderer and drug dealer Dale Cregan has been struck off. He was jailed for nine months last year after being convicted of seven counts of failing to comply with money laundering regulations and one count of failing to disclose his suspicions.

Self-employed barristers are “data controllers” and not “data processors” for the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as they need to be able to act independently of instructing solicitors, the Bar Council has said.