Compliance & Regulation

The rules on price transparency are dispelling consumers’ pre-conceptions that legal services are unaffordable and many are now shopping around online, new research has claimed.

It was “fundamentally wrong” for Legal Services Board rules to force the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants to withdraw from legal services, another accountancy body has argued.

Solicitors are concerned that some new legal technology they buy does not take into account their professional rules and ethical duties because lawtech firms are “not speaking the same language”.

The Office for Legal Complaints, the governing body of the Legal Ombudsman, has renewed its call for it to be allowed to extend its reach to unregulated legal services providers.

The Law Society and SRA need to do more to show that they take on board what solicitors have to say about the cost of practising, the Legal Services Board has warned.

The Law Society’s Conveyancing Quality Scheme is a “market barrier”, blocking entry to non-solicitor law firms, the Competition and Markets Authority has been told.

A “manifestly incompetent” partner, whose “neglect and carelessness” led to a shortage in her law firm’s client account of £214,000, has been suspended for 18 months.

Compliance with the rules on price and service transparency is improving but a stubborn minority are facing disciplinary action, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has said.

A solicitor kept money meant for counsel for several months, altered the date of a fee note from his chambers and then pleaded with her boss to hide it from the regulator.

A leading criminal law solicitor convicted of sexually assaulting an 18-year-old woman while drunk in Newcastle city centre on New Year’s Eve has been fined by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

An under-pressure trainee solicitor who billed for work she anticipated doing has not been sanctioned by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, even though she did not eventually do it.

The LSB has issued a damning diagnosis of weaknesses in the structure of the market, including inadequate transparency by law firms and smaller regulators unable to cope with the change needed.

A solicitor who sent hundreds of offensive emails and tweets to the law firm acting for him in a dispute – and was convicted of a public order offence – has agreed to remove himself from the roll.

A proposal that in-house legal departments should be regulated as a separate regulated business unit within their organisations has been broadly welcomed by senior company lawyers.

A barrister has been reprimanded and fined for misleading Google in trying to get a negative review taken down. He said he had been subjected to “distressing online trolling”.