Regulation

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.

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.

A solicitor who provided two longstanding clients with banking facilities, and also accepted more than £400,000 in loans from them without insisting that they take independent legal advice, has been fined by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

Choosing a lawyer based on recommendations from friends, family and peers can be “a sensible way to ensure a minimum level of quality”, but it means consumers are not checking for themselves what the market has to offer, the Competition and Markets Authority said yesterday.

A solicitor who submitted a series of false business expenses to his firm – including three that were actually for a birthday dinner for his wife and friends – has been struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. He was also found guilty of charging false travel expenses to clients.

Research into the growing trend of law firms switching regulator has begun so as to assess any risks for consumers and whether there may be unintended consequences. The Legal Services Board is undertaking the work and will look, among other things, at the extent to which new regulators check and use a lawyer or firm’s previous regulatory history.

Barristers still face a flexible working “penalty”, the Bar Council admitted this week as it urged chambers to consider rent reductions for those barristers seeking to work reduced hours or away from chambers because of care responsibilities.