Solicitors

A well-known Gloucestershire law firm has accepted that it did not act in the best interests of lender clients due to its involvement in stamp duty land tax avoidance schemes. In addition to its conveyancing charges – which totalled £102,000 for 65 transactions – the firm billed £28,000 for facilitating the schemes.

A solicitor has escaped being struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal after admitting dishonestly altering the date on a witness statement to make it look like it met a court-ordered deadline. The tribunal held there were exceptional circumstances that meant striking-off would be disproportionate.

Claims on the Solicitors Compensation Fund and the number of interventions into law firms are both falling as the impact of the recession finally begins to fade, and so it is now deliberately running at a deficit to reduce the level of reserves, it was reported yesterday.

The uncertainty that has followed the vote for Britain’s exit from the European Union should not slow down reforms in the legal services market, Paul Philip, the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s chief executive, has warned.

A solicitor who fraudulently claimed £37,000 in income tax repayments has been handed a suspended prison sentence and told she was “wholly unsuitable to be a solicitor”. She over-claimed tax repayments. She did this by inflating expenses, including staff costs and refunds relating to clients’ divorce fees.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has struck off a solicitor who colluded with his non-solicitor employee wife, an estate agent, to misappropriate £10,000 after submitting to the Land Registry that a property had sold for less than the price actually paid.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has struck off an assistant solicitor for dishonestly backdating client letters to conceal missed court deadlines, in the latest of a string of disciplinary cases involving faked documents. In two cases, he closed files and backdated letters before an expected Lexcel re-accreditation inspection.

The Law Society has issued a damning critique of the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s proposals for a streamlined code of conduct and – to a lesser extent – its planned overhaul of the accounts rules. The code of conduct proposals were misconceived, unnecessary, unclear, and would create a two-tier profession, it said.

A solicitor who borrowed money from the controversial Axiom Legal Financing Fund has been cleared of any misconduct by a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal – taking the count in cases arising from Axiom to five solicitors struck off and three cleared. However, costs do not follow the event in the tribunal and he was ordered to pay £46,000 in costs.

A solicitor has been struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal after dishonestly misleading a client that her firm had not received an expected £10,000 from a third party. She later repaid the amount from another client’s account without permission, and falsely claimed she had issued and conducted court proceedings on his behalf when she had not.

All four of the judges named by the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office last year after being found to have watched pornography on judicial IT equipment have now been rebuked after the final one accepted his sanction. Two other agreements with a solicitor who moved money from client to office account, and a PI law firm, have also been published.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is considering whether to make data on complaints and insurance claims against law firms available to consumers as “possible indicators of quality”, it has revealed. It may also introduce logos to denote to consumers that firms are regulated and covered by the SRA’s compensation fund.

A solicitor who oversaw “financial chaos” in his practice has been suspended, with a tribunal imposing conditions on his return to the profession in the future to ensure he does not hold a management position. He was also sanctioned for failing to co-operate with the Legal Ombudsman.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has struck off a solicitor who forged correspondence with the Legal Aid Agency, but in an unusual coda to its ruling said he still had “something to offer to the public and providers of legal services generally”.

The Legal Services Board has fired a warning shot across the bows of the Law Society in the wake of the latter’s decision to spend £61m over four years on new IT systems for both its representative and regulatory arms.