Compliance & Regulation

Independent websites providing impartial information on the quality of legal services providers are needed to guide people looking for a lawyer, the Legal Services Consumer Panel has argued.

A law firm partner who asked if it was acceptable to call a gay trainee solicitor a “poofter” – and repeated the question to the trainee – has been fined £4,000 by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

Progress by the legal regulators in understanding and tackling ongoing inequalities in the profession is “too slow” and lacks “strategic direction”, the Legal Services Board (LSB) has said. The oversight regulator said there were “fundamental shortcomings” in the collection of… Read More

A leading general counsel has attacked the assumption that in-house lawyers “leave their morals at the door” when they join their companies.

The emphasis on increasing the range and choice of legal training in the Solicitors Qualifying Examination could help remove the blockage to social mobility in the profession.

The drunken barrister who threatened a fellow member of chambers over a tenancy application did so because he believed there was a “vindictive campaign” to damage the pupil’s prospects.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is to launch a review of its approach to solicitors’ continuing competence, amid calls for spot checks or accreditation schemes to reassure consumers.

A legal assistant who lied about passing his legal executive exams so that his law firm employer would reimburse the course fees has been banned from working in the solicitors’ profession.

The Court of Appeal has upheld a ruling that a negligence claim brought by a woman against her law firm over its work on her divorce was out of time.

A solicitor who was the ‘go to’ lawyer for a gang of criminals because he would not ask too many questions about where their money came has been struck off while serving seven years in jail.

A solicitor who amended a client’s form of authority when he could not contact her and then sent it to her former employer – not knowing she had died – has been struck off for dishonesty.

The coronavirus crisis will impede much-needed efforts to turn around the performance of the Legal Ombudsman, its new chair has warned in an interview with Legal Futures.

The head of a law firm who said she was lied to by a consultant solicitor, who paid £2.25m of property sale proceeds to a third party as part of a pattern of flagrant misconduct, has accepted a rebuke.

A solicitor was kept in the dark by an experienced bookkeeper about improper transfers she was making from client to office account to keep the firm afloat, a tribunal has heard.

A solicitor whose firm received over £530,000 into its client account from an unknown third party, “sat on it” because “we just didn’t know” what to do, a tribunal has heard.