Compliance & Regulation

An MP has urged select committees to investigate the role of law firms – and in particular Herbert Smith Freehills – in helping client companies accused of wrongdoing set up compensation schemes.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is to end the practice of allowing trainee solicitors to obtain higher rights of audience but has reversed course on its proposed approach to advocacy in the youth courts.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has decided to implement its controversial plan to cut the maximum award from its Compensation Fund from £2m to £500,000.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal rejected a quarter of the outcomes agreed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority and defendants last year, its annual report has revealed.

Larger law firms face a new levy of £100-200 per £1m of revenue to support the government’s economic crime plan, under proposals outlined by the Treasury yesterday.

Lawyers have become “de facto agents of the Russian state” by helping to smooth the way of Russian money entering the UK, according to Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee.

A compliance officer for finance and administration who helped the firm’s owner use £500,000 received for disbursements to prop up the firm has accepted a ban from the profession.

The former head of business development at a leading defendant law firm has been jailed for four years after a police raid discovered 6,000 indecent images of children on his computer and other devices.

A former president of the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives has become the first member of that branch of the profession to be appointed to the Legal Services Board.

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.