Compliance & Regulation

Regulators need to bring down the barriers to technology adoption and innovation in the interests of reducing unmet legal need, the Legal Services Board has said.

Individual solicitors and their firms will have to pay an extra £13.5m to be regulated and represented in the coming year, it emerged today.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority reported transactions potentially involving money laundering worth over £75m to the National Crime Agency in the last financial year.

The High Court has granted the Solicitors Regulation Authority an extended civil restraint order to stop a struck-off solicitor from taking further legal action against it.

The Ministry of Justice has set out its vision of ensuring that “there are no unnecessary barriers preventing CILEX members progressing their careers”.

A paralegal who lied on his CV about his experience, signed a statutory declaration and held himself out as a solicitor has been banned from working in the profession.

The chair of the Bar Council has spoken out in support of a feminist barrister who said yesterday that she has complained about abuse from more than 50 “mainly White male” barristers.

A former equity partner at DLA Piper has avoided being struck off despite admitting to trying to fake a witness’s signature on a mortgage deed.

A solicitor who lied to both his employer and his regulator by denying he had any kind of relationship with a convicted illegal money lender has been struck off.

The Legal Ombudsman has achieved the required step-change in performance in the last year, it has declared, with waiting times finally falling as 44% more cases were resolved.

HM Treasury has launched a long-awaited consultation that could see a new public body replace legal regulators in supervising lawyers’ anti-money laundering activities.

There are many working practices at the Bar “which may have outlived their usefulness and no longer work in the interests of consumers”, the director general of the Bar Standards Board said yesterday.

Being a higher court judge is “saleable”, with post-judicial work “as significant a perk for many as the knight/damehood”, a former circuit judge has claimed.

A ban on UK lawyers providing ‘legal advisory services’ to Russians comes into force today, while a review has found good level of sanctions compliance among commercial barristers.

The first course offering the new way to qualify as a costs lawyer has begun admitting students in the wake of comments from a High Court master praising the contribution of costs lawyers.