Regulation

A solicitor who lied to potential insurers, on an application for judicial review and then his regulator – in a bid to evade disciplinary action – has finally been struck off.

There has been some improvement in how lawyers approach the use of non-disclosure agreements, but regulators must take “rigorous enforcement action” over poor conduct, MPs said today.

A former solicitor has been jailed for four years and two months after admitting to plundering a dead client’s estate and then forging other clients’ wills to pay off the first client’s beneficiaries.

The two partners at the same firm who acted for a man convicted of causing death by dangerous driving and the estate of the victim suing him have been cleared of acting in a conflict of interest.

Lawyers and regulators are uncertain where the boundaries lie on misconduct in the wake of the #MeToo revelations, experts have warned. Patricia Robertson QC of Fountain Court Chambers, a former vice-chair of the Bar Standards Board, said lawyers faced further… Read More

Dozens of law firms are at risk of enforcement action from the SRA after a check found that only 25% of websites were fully compliant with the new rules on price and service transparency.

The head of the independent review of legal services regulation said yesterday that scrapping regulation based on titles like solicitor or barrister and replacing it with a system based on legal activities “might not be as straightforward as some believe”.… Read More

A trainee solicitor who forged a client’s signature in a bid to pass off a copy share certificate as the original has been banned from working in the profession without the permission of the SRA.

A solicitor who “brass-plated” the practices of other solicitors and did little to supervise them has been struck off, after one misappropriated £140,000 of client money. He also paid unlawful referral fees.

The Legal Services Board has approved client protection arrangements to back the new breed of freelance solicitors, despite opposition from the Law Society and Legal Services Consumer Panel.