Solicitors

The Bar has launched a last-ditch bid to focus the criminal advocates’ quality assurance scheme on judicial evaluation and steer it away from the alternative assessment centre route favoured by solicitors. Despite lobbying from solicitor groups, the SRA has confirmed its support for the scheme.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority will not be able to start regulating alternative business structures on 6 October, Legal Futures can reveal. Further, the question of whether prospective non-lawyer investors in ABSs will have to reveal all convictions, even if they are spent, remains unresolved and could stop the SRA licensing ABSs with external ownership.

Black and minority ethnic solicitors continue to figure in a disproportionate number of regulatory actions, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has admitted. It is occuring across key areas such as interventions, referrals to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal and the imposition of practising certificate conditions.

The Legal Services Board today launched its first statutory investigation into whether to extend the scope of regulation, after its consumer panel recommended making will-writing a reserved activity. It goes further, however, by looking at what measures are required to protect consumers in the probate and estate administration markets as well,

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is to crack down on indemnity insurers that restructure law firms’ cover so as to reduce their exposure to the assigned risks pool. The move comes despite the fact that an investigation of the practice is ongoing and has yet to reach a conclusion on whether the previous rules were breached.

Solicitors who offer financial services and plan to become alternative business structures could be forced out of the market by plans to plug a gap in consumer protection created by the Legal Services Act, the Financial Services Authority has admitted.

Indemnity insurance premiums for law firms with no new claims and no significant change in circumstances are still set to rise 10% this year, a leading broker has warned. Predicting a “tough” 2011, Lockton also called for a “fundamental review of the whole conveyancing process”.

Justice minister Lord McNally has called for a crackdown on claims management companies and said the government is sympathetic to a referral fee ban, as the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill enters its committee stage tomorrow.

Some 138 law firms have closed after entering the assigned risks pool in the past two years, while solicitors who do not pay their ARP premiums are being pursued into bankruptcy, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has reported. Most of the firms (119) shut through an orderly wind-down, while 19 were closed by an SRA intervention.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has already received “strong interest” in ABS investment from abroad and from non-English law firms that want to use the structure, it has revealed. They includes one of China’s largest law firms.

The cost of a solicitor’s practising certificate is set to fall 23% this year – even more than anticipated – we can reveal. Meanwhile, the SRA is to be given the power to ensure that ABSs cannot manipulate their turnover to reduce the fees they have to pay to operate.

The board of the Solicitors Regulation Authority this month moved to parity between solicitor and lay ordinary members, ahead of introducing a lay majority in two years’ time. Shamit Saggar, the former chairman of the Legal Complaints Service, joined the board this month as part of a deal with the Legal Services Board.

Jane Ching, Reader at Nottingham Law School, outlines its experience of running the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s work-based learning pilot that offered a route to qualification as a solicitor for those working as paralegals.

Solicitors facing disciplinary proceedings could find it easier to challenge hearsay evidence after the High Court ruled that a General Medical Council panel had breached the claimant’s right to a fair hearing by admitting such evidence.

The rule which prevents solicitors and in the future alternative business structures (ABSs) from hiving off unreserved legal work into unregulated businesses may stifle new entrants to the market, the Legal Services Board has warned. The board is now considering a review of the rule’s “continuing relevance”.