Regulation

A former partner at a top City law firm with a history of drink-driving has been given a suspended sentence by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT), following a conviction for drink-driving with his five-year-old son in the car.

GT Law, one of the two firms referred to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) by Mr Justice Jay over the Sonae litigation, has said that it “strongly denies any wrongdoing”. The SRA is considering “appropriate action”.

A solicitor who has become a professional McKenzie Friend after 20 years in practice has hit out at the burden imposed on high street practitioners, which he said cost him almost £2m and pushed him into personal bankruptcy.

Paul Philip, chief executive of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), has warned criminal lawyers that they may be the subject of a “thematic review”, as the row between practitioners and their regulator over the legal aid boycott deepened.

A High Court judge has described how locks were changed and the police were called in an extraordinary stand-off over the ownership of a law firm. The case also raised questions about the extent of the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s intervention powers.

The Bar Standards Board (BSB), which predicted at one point last year that it would authorise 400 firms in 2015, has authorised only 32 in its first four months as an entity regulator, it has emerged. Meanwhile it may not be regulating alternative business structures until later next year.

Local authority legal departments are being forced to set up alternative business structures by restrictive rules on in-house lawyers, leading to the “privatisation” of public sector legal services, the director of Essex Legal Services has claimed.

The removal of regulatory restrictions on in-house lawyers could provide greater access to justice for consumers, the Legal Services Board has said. It also warned the Solicitors Regulation Authority and Bar Standards Board that the reviews of the rules for in-house lawyers they are starting “will need to be far reaching”.

The lack of guidance on the phrase ‘public interest’ in the context of legal regulation potentially makes it meaningless and wastes an opportunity to remind corporate lawyers they are not “mere service providers”, according to an academic.

Alistair MacDonald QC, chairman of the Bar Council, has called for a revolution in the training of barristers to cut what he described as “astronomical” costs and increase the chances of successful students getting a pupillage. He also raised questions about the non-lawyer ownership of law firms.