Compliance & Regulation

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.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is to take a “more robust approach” to enforcing its transparency rules after its latest work indicated widespread non-compliance.

SRA plans to replace the Solicitors Indemnity Fund with an in-house solution have been backed by the Law Society but opposed by the ‘Joint V’ of the major local law societies.

It puts the national body at odds with the ‘Joint V’ of major local law societies

Two more firms in the Metamorph Law group – including the one to which the caseloads of several others were being transferred – were shut down today.

A pupil barrister who passed off other people’s work as his own and lied about it to the head of his chambers’ pupillage committee has been told he cannot qualify for at least three years.

A solicitor “tested the ethical standards” of the profession by seeking a loan from a client to pay school fees without advising him to seek independent advice, the SDT has found.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is set to make the first changes to its Standards and Regulations since the rules were introduced three years ago.

There is “no prototype” for how to contextualise transparency data about law firms for consumers, and it will not be perfect from the start, the Legal Services Consumer Panel has warned.

The poor performance of the Bar Standards Board is set to hit barristers in the pocket as it seeks to increase salaries to overcome recruitment and retention difficulties.

The Law Society has attacked plans by the Legal Ombudsman to increase pay for its staff by 8%, as part of a 9.6% increase in its budget for the next financial year.

A barrister whose applications for pupillage at one chambers and then tenancy at another were based on a false CV has been disbarred – more than a decade after he first used it.

The SRA today closed down four of the businesses in the Metamorph Group network, comprising 10 law firms, as they were in the process of transferring their practices to another group firm.

A fee-share practice has become what is thought to be the first corporate law firm to become a not-for-profit community interest company, ensuring it donates all profits to charity.