Solicitors

The Solicitors Regulation Authority’s approach to licensing non-traditional businesses as alternative business structures is “impacting competition, access to justice and negatively affecting consumers”, the Legal Services Board has claimed.

The Law Society found itself at loggerheads with the Legal Services Consumer Panel last week after the pair placed themselves on opposite sides of the debate over who should run the process of choosing the chairman and board of the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

A London solicitor has been struck off after using client money that should have been paid to barristers to settle their fees. Paul Francis Fallon, who was at City Law Financial LLP at the time of the offences, was struck off last week.

“Radical changes” to the authorisation and supervision of alternative business structures are on the cards after the Solicitors Regulation Authority expressed concern that the number of applications from multi-disciplinary practices has been “in the tens rather than hundreds”.

Solicitors will be able to close down thousands of client accounts with residual balances of up to £500 and donate the money to charity under plans unveiled yesterday by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. The regulator is also planning to end the annual ‘keeping of the roll’ exercise.

There is a “real risk” that law firms do not understand how impending changes to the consumer credit regime could have a serious effect on them – such as needing to be additionally regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority – the Legal Services Board has warned.

The legal challenge to the Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates (QASA) is nearly at an end after the Court of Appeal refused permission to appeal the High Court decision that rejected it.

A tiny number of criminal advocates has so far signed up to the Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates (QASA), suggesting a profession-wide boycott of the scheme is holding.

A solicitor has lost an appeal against an HMRC refusal to anonymise its decision, so as to prevent the Solicitors Regulation Authority from discovering that a penalty had been imposed on him for ‘deliberate inaccuracy’.

The six lawyer groups that advise the Solicitors Regulation Authority on its equality and diversity strategy have condemned as “fundamentally flawed” last week’s report on the disproportionate representation of black and minority ethnic solicitors in the regulator’s disciplinary work.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has condemned the recent Legal Services Board recommendation of a civil standard of proof for use across disciplinary tribunals as “looking like a small tail wagging a large dog”.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has taken the unusual step of striking out a case against two solicitors in the middle of the hearing, after the integrity of the investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority was thrown into question.

The disproportionately high representation of black and minority ethnic solicitors in the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s disciplinary work is caused by broader socio-economic factors around access to the profession, and not discrimination by the regulator, a major independent report has concluded.

There needs to be a fundamental review of the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s model of regulation, its new chief executive has told this website in his first interview since joining the organisation six weeks ago.

A Gloucestershire solicitor who also served as the county’s coroner has been struck off after taking nearly £2m from clients to fund an extravagant lifestyle. The case of Alan Crickmore has made headlines for some years.