Solicitors

A law firm and a solicitor have separately been rebuked by the Solicitors Regulation Authority for acting where there was a conflict of interest. Other rebukes have been handed out to a firm that did not comply with Legal Ombudsman decisions and a solicitor who said he was a sole practitioner when he wasn’t.

Personal injury lawyers generally think the market is working well, but there are continuing concerns over claimant firms bringing ‘frivolous’ cases, as well as the use of low-level staff, research commissioned by the Solicitors Regulation Authority has found. It also described a market polarising between big and small firms.

The new codes of conduct being drafted by the Solicitors Regulation Authority will include guidance to protect solicitors practising in unregulated businesses, as well as law firm whistleblowers, it has emerged. SRA chief executive Paul Philip strongly defended the principle of allowing solicitors to practise from unregulated firms.

A solicitor who made withdrawals from a client’s bank accounts under powers of attorney that had been terminated, has accepted the maximum penalty that the Solicitors Regulation Authority can impose without referring him to a disciplinary tribunal.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has struck off a partner for dishonestly misappropriating funds from deceaseds’ estates and in one case overcharging by almost 1,000%. He admitted that the ledger given to the SRA was “a work of fiction” and that he had spent two or three days preparing it.

A solicitor involved in conveyancing transactions that resulted in the non-payment of £2m in stamp duty land tax has accepted a rebuke from the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Now defunct Leeds firm Dixon Law Solicitors acted in 47 transactions over two and a half years that used two SDLT avoidance schemes,

Solicitors’ professional indemnity insurers paid out around £2bn due to negligence claims in the 10 years to 2014, startling new figures released yesterday by the Solicitors Regulation Authority revealed. The regulator said that around 142,000 claims were made in that decade, one in five of which was successful.

An ex-solicitor has been found guilty and jailed for five years for five counts of fraud by false representation after he hijacked a law firm’s identity – his second spell in jail for fraud after he previously stole from his own firm’s client account. The conviction came at the end of an 11-day trial.

Placing law firms’ complaints data and insurance claims in the public domain are among the “initial ideas” published today by the Solicitors Regulation Authority to improve transparency in the legal market – but it is not currently planning to mandate firms to publish prices.

The High Court has granted insurance company LV= permission to bring committal proceedings against solicitors from a defunct law firm after two starkly contrasting medical reports emerged in a road traffic case they were handling.