Compliance & Regulation

A solicitor who plundered her client account to meet her personal financial obligations and her ex-partner’s car debts has been struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

The country’s largest conveyancing group has been told by its regulator to improve communication with clients in the wake of a paralysing cyber-attack this week.

There are “differing levels of achievement and some significant weaknesses” among the UK’s legal regulators in their approach to anti-money laundering, their oversight body has reported.

The Legal Services Board has said other legal regulators could learn lessons from a highly critical review it has published on the Faculty Office, the regulator of notaries.

It is not the job of the Solicitors Regulation Authority to help retired solicitors “sleep easy” by protecting them from historic negligence claims, its director of regulatory policy has warned.

A solicitor at a commercial law firm in Cardiff has been fined £24,000 for recklessly providing a banking facility for a client over a period of almost two years.

A tribunal has condemned a partner’s “outrageous” lies to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, made in a bid to frustrate its investigation into her firm.

Only 47% of barristers feel generally content with their working lives, a report for the Bar Council has found, while just 45% felt they could “cope with the competing demands” of their job.

A law firm is at the heart of the largest ever proceeds of crime forfeiture in the UK after an investigation spanning three continents.

The case of a solicitor who was manifestly incompetent in handling a conveyancing transaction is “a warning to the profession” of stepping beyond their expertise, a tribunal has said.

Performance at the Legal Ombudsman will get worse before it gets better as the complaints-handler has admitted recovery will take longer than it anticipated.

The time for talking about race inequality at the Bar is over and all organisations with a stake in the profession should set specific targets for improvement, a major Bar Council report has concluded.

Improving the diversity of those who sit in the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal is “front and centre” of a major recruitment drive, according to the Court of Appeal judge overseeing the process.

Licensed conveyancers who generate complaints referred to the Legal Ombudsman will have to shoulder more of its cost than those who do not, after the change won approval.

A solicitor has been struck off after telling a client that her case was ongoing when it had actually settled and using some of the money to pay other clients damages they were not entitled to.