Regulation

Friday’s Competition and Markets Authority report on legal services has reignited the debate over independent regulation, with both the Solicitors Regulation Authority and Bar Standards Board welcoming the call for separation from their representative bodies.

Competition in legal services for individual and small business consumers is not working as well as it might, with lack of transparency over price and service the main problem, the provisional report of the Competition and Markets Authority has found.

An academic audit of a law firm’s business has broken down its offering into more than 300 ‘products’ as part of a radical and so far successful attempt to increase profits. It was carried out under a government-backed knowledge transfer partnership with Oxford Brookes University’s business school.

A sole practitioner who “simply buried his head in the sand” over his failure to secure indemnity insurance and carry out an orderly wind-down of his firm has been reprimanded by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has banned a paralegal at an alternative business structure and a trainee solicitor at former Hull firm Ward Legal from working for law firms. The SRA said the paralegal sent e-mails to his partner at another law firm making comments that “failed to encourage equality of opportunity and respect for diversity”.

The ramifications of leaving the European Union are likely to be wide-ranging and could restrict the ability of barristers to practise outside England and Wales, the chairman of the Bar Council has warned. Chantal-Aimee Doerries QC said the Bar Council was setting up a working group on the impact of Brexit.

A solicitor whose CV was full of professional and academic qualifications he did not have has agreed to remove himself from the profession in a move akin to being struck off. He used the CV when he became a consultant in the London office of Canadian firm McCarthy Tetrault.

Three solicitors at a Hertfordshire-based law firm who acted as professional executors are not liable for breach of trust after beneficiaries claimed they had lost almost £1.5m on investments, the High Court has ruled.

A criminal law barrister has launched a direct access website to facilitate private prosecutions by people with cases that the Crown Prosecution Service and police have failed to pursue. He said his website had generated five cases already after being up and running only “a couple of months”.

A solicitor who took money from vulnerable people for whom she was the court-appointed deputy – and even kept some of it in cash in her wardrobe – has been struck off after the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal ruled that her conduct was more than just a “cry for help”.