Solicitors

Conveyancers are facing higher professional indemnity insurance costs – and their clients higher fees as a result – due to yesterday’s Court of Appeal ruling in Dreamvar, experts have predicted. One said the judgment “will provide greater protection to buyers, but will shake up the conveyancing industry with much greater risk of liability”.

Unregulated online legal services company Rocket Lawyer has received a waiver to allow practising solicitors to advise its clients, Legal Futures can reveal. Peninsula – the business services giant that owns Croner – has its own waiver, and is highlighting to potential customers the benefits of privilege that come with it, we can also report.

The number of qualified accountants’ reports due to rule breaches has fallen by two-thirds since the rules were changed in 2015, but the amount then being investigated for possible rule breaches has tripled, it has emerged. A handful of them have led to regulatory action as a result.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority should investigate whether there are regulatory barriers to law firms that become alternative business structures providing other professional services such as accountancy and surveying, rather than vice versa, a report it commissioned has recommended.

Leading HR company Croner has become the first unregulated business allowed to employ practising solicitors who can advise its clients. The move, facilitated by a waiver issued by the Solicitors Regulation Authority as part of its innovation ‘safe space’, will also allow Croner to offer training contracts.

A partner has been fined £10,000 plus £28,000 costs for being “sloppy, lazy and careless” for acting in conveyances on the instructions of a third party without confirming them with the clients or conducting due diligence on the clients or transaction funds.

A solicitor who claimed that he “unwittingly facilitated” money laundering on behalf of an associate of convicted murderer and drug dealer Dale Cregan has been struck off. He was jailed for nine months last year after being convicted of seven counts of failing to comply with money laundering regulations and one count of failing to disclose his suspicions.

Two solicitors and a registered foreign lawyer at an immigration firm in north-west London have been fined by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal for misappropriating client money. The tribunal said there was no evidence that the sole owner of the firm had “taken an interest” in its financial”.

A solicitor who specialised in acting for the elderly and their families has been jailed for two and a half years for the wilful neglect of her own 79-year-old mother, who died in squalor despite her daughter having power of attorney to act on her behalf. The prosecutor described it as “one of the most shocking and sickening cases of neglect I have come across”.

A solicitor who “left his moral compass at home” as took money from client account to try and keep his firm afloat has been struck off, and the cashier who assisted him banned from the profession. The firm, Handley Brown in Preston, had three county court judgments against it and faced a winding-up petition.