Compliance & Regulation

Mishcon De Reya – the leading London firm heading for a stock market listing this year – has agreed to pay a fine of £232,500 over multiple breaches of anti-money laundering rules.

The Bar Standards Board lacks access to “sufficient capability, capacity and resources”, the Legal Services Board said yesterday in its annual review of all the legal regulators’ performance.

The Law Society of Scotland has been authorised to regulate licensed legal services providers, the equivalent of ABSs, more than 10 years after the law allowing for them came into force.

The Bar Tribunals & Adjudication Service has gone a step further in toughening up its sanctions guidance for barristers found to have been involved in sexual misconduct and discrimination.

The Legal Services Consumer Panel is “uncertain” whether radical measures being considered by the Legal Ombudsman to cut its backlog of complaints will deliver sufficient change.

A solicitor who had a “misplaced belief” in the honesty and integrity of another solicitor jailed for fraud has been fined £30,000 over multiple rule breaches that resulted.

The Bar Council has expressed scepticism over a sharp planned rise in the BSB’s budget for the coming financial year, which would amount to a 9% increase in the cost of practising.

The number of freelance solicitors has risen by more than a third since April to 413, with many solicitors saying the SRA’s Standards and Regulations have given them greater flexibility in how they work.

A veteran solicitor who backdated an application to the property chamber of the First-tier Tribunal after missing a deadline has accepted being struck off.

A London-listed law firm’s bid to buy a New York practice has led the state Bar association to limit the circumstances in which New York lawyers can work for firms owned by non-lawyers.

A solicitor who “turned his life around” and “faced up to his problems”, including alcohol addiction, after being suspended has regained his practising certificate.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has paid a record £228,000 in costs to a solicitor whose prosecution a disciplinary tribunal found was “improperly brought and pursued”.

The Law Society has called on the Legal Ombudsman to take “radical action” to cut the growing backlog of complaints, saying progress in performance has been too slow to date.

A partner and his law firm have each been fined after failing to deliver on 32 undertakings and confirmations within the agreed timescale – with six still outstanding five years after the transaction concluded.

An overhaul of anti-money laundering legislation – including targeting professional enablers like lawyers – is needed if the UK is to create a “hostile environment for the world’s kleptocrats”.