Compliance & Regulation

The Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner has praised the BSB and SRA for their co-operation in shutting down an advice firm and having the barrister who supervised it disbarred.

A Coventry law firm has been fined more than £46,000 for failing to have proper anti-money laundering procedures in place, one of the largest such penalties to date.

WhatsApp has become the “preferred communications tool” for law firms handling asylum work, but most lack a “clear, written usage policy”, the SRA has said.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has ordered the SRA to pay costs of £5,000 after bringing a “flawed and misconceived” case against a non-solicitor.

The Legal Services Board is entitled to withhold the email addresses of its board of directors and staff, the Information Commissioner’s Office has ruled in response to an FoI request.

A solicitor who arranged sham marriages as an immigration lawyer while “falsely representing” to the Home Office that his own marriage was genuine, has been struck off.

A local authority solicitor who provided “false and misleading information” to colleagues over a period of 18 months about an application to discharge a child’s care order has been struck off.

The backlog of almost 3,400 cases waiting to be investigated at the Legal Ombudsman “reflects the scale of the challenges” it faces, the chief ombudsman has said.

Complaints about the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s handling of cases rose by 29% last year, with the increase in interventions part of the reason.

A New York lawyer may hold a financial interest in an alternative business structure operating legally elsewhere, the city bar association has said.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is pressing ahead with a huge hike in the compensation fund levy in the wake of the spiralling cost of law firm failures.

Solicitors may face a more restricted professional indemnity insurance market this year amid growing concern over limitations on insurers aggregating claims.

Relations between the Legal Services Board and the Bar Standards Board are close to breaking point over the speed of reform at the barrister regulator.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has reported two law firms to the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation, part of the Treasury, for breaching sanctions on Russia.

A managing partner who used staff pension contributions to prop up his firm has been struck off, but his two equity partners were cleared of misconduct.