Regulation

The Legal Services Board has stepped up the pressure on the Law Society’s role as the approved regulator of solicitors by announcing a formal investigation into whether the Solicitors Regulation Authority has sufficient independence.

The Legal Services Board will next year carry out the first formal assessment of how the profession’s regulators have performed in improving diversity in their parts of the law, it has announced. Publishing its revised diversity guidance, the board said, however, that it expects to see the guidance influencing activities this year.

A former chief executive of Cheshire-based solicitors Forster Dean, who is now a leading football administrator in Northern Ireland, has been suspended by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal over accounts rule breaches.

Disciplinary cases involving solicitors are now akin to High Court trials and there needs to be a major overhaul that would make the Solicitors Regulation Authority responsible for handing out all sanctions, including strike-offs, a former prosecutor has said.

The High Court has overturned a disciplinary tribunal finding against a barrister found to have pestered three women at a chambers summer party. Mrs Justice Lang said Stephen Howd’s “inappropriate, and at times offensive, behaviour was a consequence of his medical condition”, exacerbated by excessive alcohol.

Claimant law firm Asons has agreed to repay more than £100,000 to AXA after admitting to falsely and systematically inflating its legal costs, the insurer said today. The dispute involved 65 personal injury cases where “Asons overstated the qualifications and experience of its legal staff to falsely inflate [its] bills”.

The solicitor who safeguarded more than £100,000 of stolen cash for a charismatic conman posing as the Pope’s banker has been fined £2,000 following her conviction for transferring criminal property. The Crown Court judge had said she was “used” by fraudster Luis Nobre.

Three partners of a law firm that was tricked by fraudsters into paying the proceeds of a property sale into the wrong bank account – and did not carry out sufficient checks before doing so – have accepted rebukes from the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

Some 2,500 barristers will earn more than £240,000 this year, Bar Council figures have shown, and they will have to pay an extra £200 for their practising certificates after the Legal Services Board approved a 12% hike in fees across the board.

The Divisional Court has thrown out an appeal by a solicitor disciplined after representing a client in court when he was not allowed to – and claimed he was instead acting as a McKenzie Friend and so beyond the regulator’s reach.