Regulation

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has struck off a solicitor who colluded with his non-solicitor employee wife, an estate agent, to misappropriate £10,000 after submitting to the Land Registry that a property had sold for less than the price actually paid.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has struck off an assistant solicitor for dishonestly backdating client letters to conceal missed court deadlines, in the latest of a string of disciplinary cases involving faked documents. In two cases, he closed files and backdated letters before an expected Lexcel re-accreditation inspection.

The Law Society has issued a damning critique of the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s proposals for a streamlined code of conduct and – to a lesser extent – its planned overhaul of the accounts rules. The code of conduct proposals were misconceived, unnecessary, unclear, and would create a two-tier profession, it said.

The Legal Services Board has warned the Bar’s regulator that it cannot keep changing the cut score for the test would-be barristers have to pass before being allowed to take the Bar professional training course. However, it approved changes to the rules that will allow the BSB to lift the cut score this year.

The Bar Council has slammed the Bar Standards Board’s forthcoming continuing professional development regime as being burdensome, complicated, unfit for purpose, and involving “pointless” self-assessment. It warned that the scheme would lead to “many practitioners” being “likely to fail in their compliance”.

A solicitor who borrowed money from the controversial Axiom Legal Financing Fund has been cleared of any misconduct by a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal – taking the count in cases arising from Axiom to five solicitors struck off and three cleared. However, costs do not follow the event in the tribunal and he was ordered to pay £46,000 in costs.

A solicitor has been struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal after dishonestly misleading a client that her firm had not received an expected £10,000 from a third party. She later repaid the amount from another client’s account without permission, and falsely claimed she had issued and conducted court proceedings on his behalf when she had not.

All four of the judges named by the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office last year after being found to have watched pornography on judicial IT equipment have now been rebuked after the final one accepted his sanction. Two other agreements with a solicitor who moved money from client to office account, and a PI law firm, have also been published.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is considering whether to make data on complaints and insurance claims against law firms available to consumers as “possible indicators of quality”, it has revealed. It may also introduce logos to denote to consumers that firms are regulated and covered by the SRA’s compensation fund.

A leading white collar crime barrister said this week that he may conduct straightforward litigation through his new Bar Standards Board-authorised entity. Bright Line Law, launched this week, is the brainchild of Jonathan Fisher QC and was devised in part as an attempt to bring together the various strands of his activities.