Solicitors

The Court of Appeal yesterday quashed the conviction of a solicitor jailed for fraud and money laundering in £650,000 worth of property transactions. However, a conviction for perverting the course of justice – for selling a Lamborghini that was subject to a freezing order – was unaffected.

Regulators should empower consumers to drive improvements in the quality of legal services, while professional indemnity insurers could hand over firm-specific claims data to help target poorly performing practices, the Legal Services Board has suggested.

More common training of would-be lawyers, sector-wide CPD, and scrapping the training contract and pupillage, are among the “more radical” options being considered by the Legal Education and Training Review, according to its first discussion paper, issued yesterday.

Practising certificates (PCs) continue to dominate news from the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), with around 10,000 solicitors failing to meet last Friday’s deadline for renewal. The SRA has also begun a review of this year’s chaotic PC renewal exercise.

Barristers and solicitors are at loggerheads over whether plea-only advocates need to undergo judicial evaluation as part of the Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates. If a resolution cannot be found, then the whole scheme could fall apart.

Providing immigration advice and services may need to become a reserved legal activity, the Legal Services Board has suggested. It found that there is likely to be “significant consumer detriment” in the way this work is being regulated at the moment.

The board of the Solicitors Regulation Authority this week approved the third edition of the SRA Handbook since it went live last October, with a fourth one due before the end of June. The SRA said it recognised the disruption this would cause but argued that the updates have been unavoidable.

The Legal Education and Training Review needs to be radical and permanently separate authorisation to practise from professional titles, the chairman of the Legal Services Board said this week.

The vast majority of law firms are non-compliant with the Solicitors Code of Conduct, research by the Solicitors Regulation Authority has found. Most of the 200 firms assessed had four or five incidences of non-compliance.

The 31 March deadline for law firms to nominate their new compliance officers is to be pushed back as a result of the continuing practising certificate renewal problems at the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

The High Court has handed a suspended four-month sentence to a solicitor who failed to co-operate with an investigation by the Legal Ombudsman. The judge only held back from committing him to prison because of his personal mitigation.

A former registered foreign lawyer at the helm of a criminal gang that defrauded high street banks out of almost £8m by taking out mortgages on properties they did not own was jailed for seven years last week.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has rejected calls from the Law Society and practitioners to curb the amount of information it publishes about solicitors subject to regulatory sanctions – despite particular concern over referrals to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

Divisions over quality assurance for advocates have deepened after solicitors were advised not to take part in a Bar Standards Board survey on the issue, while specialist Bar associations have been urged to oppose QASA as well.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has issued a formal warning to lawyers to think twice before becoming involved in stamp duty land tax schemes. It will look “very closely” at the conduct of any firm actively involved in such schemes,