Compliance & Regulation

Pressure on the Bar Standards Board to improve its performance ratcheted up today after it scored by far the worst of all the legal regulators in the Legal Services Board’s annual assessment.

A retired solicitor has been fined £7,500 for using client accounts as banking facilities over decades to handle property management work for Arab clients.

A US lawyer advised his clients to have someone with Covid or another “highly infectious, nasty disease” lick and handle an envelope being sent to opposing counsel, it has emerged.

The new chair of the Bar Council has called on the Ministry of Justice to review the Legal Services Board, prompting a tart response from the oversight regulator.

Legal regulators can reduce the amount of enforcement work they need to undertake if they can build enough trust that lawyers will approach them before things go wrong, an event has heard.

A competition specialist is to join the Solicitors Regulation Authority as its new executive director for strategy and innovation, while the LSB’s policy chief is leaving to oversee bailiffs.

A partner who used client funds to make payments for other clients – on occasion to hide the fact that they had been made subject to costs orders – has been struck off.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority can finally enforce a £15,000 costs order against a struck-off solicitor more than 12 years after it was made, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has ruled.

A solicitor who dishonestly amended a report on title to correct an error she had made more than two years earlier has agreed to remove herself from the roll until 2030 at the earliest.

CILEX – the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives – has urged its regulator to press ahead with plans to seek the power to award higher rights of audience to members.

The Scottish government has chosen the least radical option for regulatory reform of the legal profession, rejecting the ideas of either a single or an oversight regulator.

A solicitor who strung along two clients for several years that he had applied for their indefinite leave to remain in the UK when he had not has been struck off.

A registered foreign lawyer has been suspended for 18 months after being duped to front a law firm where likely fraudulent conveyancing transactions took place behind his back.

Slater & Gordon has accepted a fine of nearly £82,000 for historic shortcomings in the legal services business it acquired from Quindell.

The pupil barrister who passed off other people’s work as his own on three occasions avoided disbarment because he was suffering from a serious mental illness exacerbated by lockdown.