Regulation

Significant numbers of new advocates are “weaker than might be hoped on basic knowledge” of ethical rules, a major report has found. The report also found that ethics training before and after qualification was “insufficiently robust or frequent to enable confident ethical practice amongst new advocates”.

A solicitor who ignored restrictions on his practising certificate and worked as a sole practitioner when he was not meant to has been suspended by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. He told the tribunal that he was “only trying to make a living” and that the restrictions meant “very few firms were willing to take him on”.

The Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE) – the centralised test proposed for would-be practitioners – will be split into two stages, with the first consisting mainly of computer-based questions, the Solicitors Regulation Authority revealed yesterday.

Legal executives are increasingly less likely to want to train as solicitors, switching to a trainee contract after having been a paralegal can involve a decrease in contact with clients, a major survey has found. The research said workplace experience helps to develop the competences needed to be a solicitor.

The Bar Standards Board has backed a more flexible, outcomes-based continuing professional development regime, despite the fears of some board members that it would degenerate into a “paper exercise”. The move follows a consultation exercise to which only one individual barrister, along with six organisations, responded.

A trainee solicitor who misled clients that their claims were being progressed when they had actually been struck out, and also sought to mislead the court, has accepted a rebuke and £1,000 fine to avoid a referral to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

The personal injury sector has been a “huge success story”, the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s executive director of strategic planning and performance has said, but the regulator wants to weed out the bad conduct that exists from claimant and defendant lawyers alike.

A solicitor who made multiple complaints against two barristers who acted for the claimant in litigation in which he was a defendant, has failed in an application to judicially review the Bar Standards Board’s (BSB) decision to dismiss the complaints.

An experienced criminal lawyer has been suspended for five years by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal after twice being fined for previous accounts rule breaches. The tribunal said the misconduct was due to the solicitor “placing his head in the sand and due to his ineptitude and unacceptable practice”.

Solicitors could “come under pressure to compromise their professional obligations” if they are allowed to operate from unregulated firms where they are outnumbered, according to the author of the first academic study of compliance officers for legal practice.