Solicitors

A rare bid by a solicitor to overturn an intervention into her practice has failed in the High Court, with the judge finding there was good reason to suspect dishonesty. The bulk of the allegations were that she employed a struck-off solicitor, while later dishonestly denying this.

A “significant majority” of the 250 or so responses to the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s consultation on the proposed Solicitors Qualifying Examination have expressed concerns about the plans, the regulator has acknowledged. Responses seen to date indicate a wall of opposition.

The initial findings from the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s ‘Question of trust’ exercise has found sharply divergent views about how to judge solicitors’ misconduct. More than 5,000 people took part in the consultation, which aims to determine the correct baseline of solicitors’ behaviour when making regulatory decisions.

A solicitor who admitted he should never have qualified in the first place has been struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal for misusing client money. Separately, it struck off a former sole practitioner who is serving four years in prison for fraud after stealing over £620,000.

The solicitor who safeguarded more than £100,000 of stolen cash for a charismatic conman posing as the Pope’s banker was last week spared jail after a judge heard the stress of the case has robbed her of the chance of conceiving a child.

The partner at City giant DLA Piper who hit the headlines in 2014 for lewd e-mail exchanges with Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore has been referred to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

The first academic study of compliance officers for legal practice has found a “tendency” not to report regulatory failures to the Solicitors Regulation Authority. There was also evidence of COLPs at ABSs with mainly non-lawyer management struggling to get across the importance of following the rules.

A solicitor has been convicted of helping launder money on behalf of a man who claimed to be Pope Francis’s banker as part of a massive scam. Buddika Kadurugamuwa will be sentenced later this week after being found guilty of one count of transferring criminal property.

A sole practitioner who overcharged by 500% for private client work has been struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. The SDT also found that Premji Naran Patel was “robbing Peter to pay Paul” by improperly moving money between different client accounts.

The Ministry of Justice has given its strongest indication yet that, once the legal regulators become independent, lawyers will no longer be compelled to make a financial contribution to their representative bodies.