Compliance & Regulation

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.

A director of a former London law firm who admitted fabricating grants of probate and using client money to buy jewellery has been struck off.

A junior solicitor diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome who was convicted after sending a woman he briefly dated abusive Facebook messages has now been fined £10,000 by a disciplinary tribunal.

A solicitor who failed to advise on the “obvious risks” of four off-plan property development schemes has been fined £10,000. His advice was “so inadequate as to be incompetent”.

A solicitor has been struck off for falsifying court documents to make a client think his application to extend his leave to remain in the UK had been made before the leave had expired.

The First-tier Tribunal has upheld the decision of the Legal Services Board not to release an email exchange with the Solicitors Regulation Authority over the Leigh Day case.

A revised accounts code that expressly allows firms of licensed conveyancers to use third-party managed accounts has been approved by the Legal Services Board.