Legal Executives

Lawyers are among those who could face prosecution if they fail to report information that could undermine UK financial sanctions, after a change to the law that came into force this week. “Independent legal professionals”, along with trust or company service providers, accountants and others are now captured by the European Union Financial Sanctions Regulations 2017.

The Legal Services Board has given the frontline regulators largely positive reviews of their performance, but warned the Solicitors Regulation Authority that it will be monitoring the impact of its controversial decision to end public and press access to board meetings

Legal regulators have responded cautiously to the Competition and Markets Authority’s recommendations on price transparency, pledging to pilot regulatory requirements and test their effects on the lawyers and firms they regulate. They promised to implement controversial measures to encourage lawyers to publish prices if possible.

Law firm compliance officers and money laundering reporting officers have been scrambling to get to grips with the biggest shake-up in anti-money laundering rules in a decade, with the final regulations – which were only published on Thursday – coming into force today.

A chartered legal executive has launched a start-up alternative business structure specialising in personal injury but with ambitious plans for expansion into a variety of legal areas, including sports law.

The Legal Services Board has dropped plans to probe why it is taking women and those from ethnic minorities so long to reach senior roles in the profession. It also rejected the Law Society’s claim that it is putting too much emphasis on promoting competition at the expense of the other regulatory objectives it is meant to uphold.

Plans to force lawyers to be more transparent about their fees and complaints records could first be piloted across areas of work that have different regulators. The Solicitors Regulation Authority could also widen its plan for an online register of solicitors’ regulatory data to encompass all regulated lawyers.

The Chartered Institute of Legal Executives (CILEx) has launched a campaign to recruit paralegals – especially law graduates who have not gained further qualification – as associate members. They are entitled to use the letters ACILEx after their name.

The Chartered Institute of Legal Executives (CILEx) has unveiled major governance reform that it said prepares the body for the government making legal regulators entirely independent. Crucially, it said the changes would ensure that CILEx continues to be viable as a professional body without receiving any income from practising fees.

The Competition and Market Authority’s report on legal services yesterday provoked a predictably mixed response that pitted the Law Society against the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and found support from the body representing paid McKenzie Friends. Meanwhile, the Council for Licensed Conveyancers called on the Legal Services Board to use its powers to force regulatory independence to happen.

The Lord Chief Justice has called for judges to be appointed to the boards of the main legal regulators to ensure “tough standards of ethical behaviour and competence” in litigation. Lord Thomas said it seemed “very odd” that the judiciary was not represented on the boards of the SRA, BSB and CILEx Regulation.

The Ministry of Justice has no intention of dropping its plans to separate the legal regulators from their representative bodies, it said yesterday as it unveiled reviews of how the Legal Services Board and Legal Ombudsman are operating.

Significant numbers of new advocates are “weaker than might be hoped on basic knowledge” of ethical rules, a major report has found. The report also found that ethics training before and after qualification was “insufficiently robust or frequent to enable confident ethical practice amongst new advocates”.

The body representing chartered legal executives has called on the profession to end discrimination against lawyers who have qualified through non-university routes and open up the senior judiciary to those entered the law by alternative means.

More than four years after it was meant to happen, implementation of the much-delayed Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates (QASA) is still stuck, while the profession awaits the government’s decision on whether it will set up an overlapping panel of defence advocates, Legal Futures can report.