Compliance & Regulation

The Legal Services Board is to undertake a “first-principles analysis” of the list of reserved legal activities to consider “potential alternative configurations”.

Stronger rules on how clients are informed about their right to complain, and ensuring verbal expressions of dissatisfaction are treated as complaints, are set to be introduced next year.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is going to have to wait until the end of the Post Office inquiry before it can take formal disciplinary action against any lawyers involved in the scandal.

There are only 15 barristers on Trustpilot but their pages are viewed 4,000 times a day by consumers, showing the opportunity for the Bar, a webinar heard last week.

A greater focus on professional ethics among law students and qualified lawyers, with stronger supervision by regulators, is needed to uphold the rule of law, the Legal Services Board has said.

A solicitor accused of not having a firm-wide anti-money laundering risk assessment in place and lying about it to the SRA, has been cleared by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

The SRA risks acting “unfairly and arbitrarily” if it refers almost all cases relating to sexual misconduct to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, a leading regulatory lawyer has warned.

The Legal Services Consumer Panel has called on regulators to consider how information providers give to consumers can be standardised, with complaints and conveyancing prices particular concerns.

The Council for Licensed Conveyancers is making greater use of the range of its enforcement powers, rather than going straight to full disciplinary action, its chief executive has said.

A barrister who “lost control of his finances” during the breakdown of his marriage and was convicted of a VAT offence has been reprimanded by a Bar disciplinary tribunal.

A solicitor who shuffled around client account money to prop up his firm – leaving a hole of at least £230,000 and charities out of money bequeathed to them – has been struck off.

An SRA with “beefed up” powers should be the single body policing money laundering across the UK legal sector, which currently enjoys “near impunity” from breaching the rules.

An experienced solicitor has been struck off for taking advantage of the widow of a deceased solicitor after being instructed to wind up his practice and deal with his estate.

The lead counsel to the Post Office Horizon Inquiry last week made clear that the role of lawyers, “some of them senior”, will be put under scrutiny in the coming months.

The legal profession is “drawing the ethical boundaries in the wrong place” in its dealings with corrupt kleptocrats and oligarchs, and risks having reforms imposed on it as a result.