Solicitors

Almost a fifth of firms have reported “failures in competent legal service delivery” in the last 12 months, a major study for the Solicitors Regulation Authority has found.

Law firms should consider setting diversity targets for BME lawyers and staff, just as some have done with women, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has said.

Solicitors in law firms are slightly more diverse than the rest of society, the results of the profession-wide diversity monitoring undertaken by the Solicitors Regulation Authority have shown.

Solicitors will be required to make training declarations on their practicing certificate applications following the phasing out of hours-based Continuing Professional Development (CPD), the Solicitors Regulation Authority has decided.

The Legal Services Board has told the government that if it wants to appoint ‘small business appeals champions’ for legal services, it should appoint them to the boards of the eight front-line regulators rather than the super-regulator.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is pushing ahead with plans to abolish all of the prescriptive requirements around continuing professional development and leave it to solicitors and their firms to decide how best to ensure their continuing competence.

A solicitor has been struck off following his jailing for bribery charges in the US, in what is thought to be the first prosecution brought by the Solicitors Regulation Authority where a solicitor was convicted overseas.

Preventing mortgage lenders from claiming on solicitors’ compulsory indemnity insurance will “destroy high street conveyancing”, Law Society chief executive Des Hudson has said, in a wide-ranging speech on the state of the profession.

The new chief executive of the Solicitors Regulation Authority, Paul Philip, has used one of his first public platforms since being appointed to outline the new “back to basics” approach he wants the regulator to take.

Solicitors must not exploit clients’ lack of knowledge about wills for their own advantage, the SRA has warned. In a newly issued guidance note, the regulator said clients should not be led to believe that appointing a solicitor as executor was “essential or indeed the norm”.

Yorkshire Building Society has said it has “no present intention” of reconsidering a ban it has decided to impose on firms with unrated indemnity insurers, even though the Solicitors Regulation Authority last week decided against one.

The introduction of the Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates (QASA) is likely to be delayed yet again after four barristers won permission to appeal against the dismissal of their judicial review application by the High Court in January.

The SRA has acknowledged that the majority of responses received to its consultation on banning unrated indemnity insurers favoured a ban. Of 31 responses, 18 were in favour and 13 against.

The Bar Council has called for strict new rules to check that criminal law solicitors are acting properly when they guide clients to in-house advocates as opposed to external counsel.

Consumers of legal services do not all need the same level of protection and some of them, such as big corporations, might not need “any protection at all”, the SRA has said in a policy statement on its approach to regulation.