SRA: Reports flooding in
Reports to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) about solicitors’ competence rose by 48% to over 4,000 last year, the regulator has revealed.
Its annual assessment of continuing competence said some solicitors “continue to face challenges documenting their reflection and carrying out narrow learning and development”.
Although there was a tendency to focus learning and development “on maintaining technical legal knowledge rather than the wider skills needed to maintain competence”, the SRA said the issues its review found “do not suggest profession-wide concerns”.
The SRA said many solicitors wanted to ensure they could apply their knowledge of the law to “relevant processes and procedures accurately”.
But complaints nonetheless featured errors or omissions in documents, incomplete or inaccurate information and forms, “failure to provide required supporting material” and “documents not fully reflecting the client’s instructions or the intended outcome”.
These issues arose across a wide range of work types but were “more common in matters involving high volumes of transactional work”.
Other concerns related to how matters were progressed and managed. “This included missed steps, incomplete preparation, insufficient evidence gathering, and poor management of key stages in the matter.
“Reports described a range of impacts, including delays, disputes, reduced confidence and additional stress.”
On communication with clients, the SRA said some reports identified issues such as limited explanation of risks, options and potential outcomes, legal information not being communicated clearly, insufficient information about available courses of action and “the reasons for recommendations and information about matters such as costs, timescales and key deadlines”.
Clients reported a range of impacts, “including delays, uncertainty and difficulty making informed decisions as a result”.
The SRA said it had analysed competence-related reports from January 2024 to the end of December 2025, as well as the findings of its wider monitoring work over the past year, to identify competence concerns and challenges.
The number of competence-related reports received increased from 2,720 in 2024 to 4,038 in 2025. Due to an overall increase, however, they remained stable at 23% as a proportion of all reports received.
On a positive note, the SRA said: “Through our work, we know that most solicitors keep their knowledge and skills up to date. We also have evidence that most firms we regulate have robust systems and controls in place to make sure the solicitors they employ remain competent to deliver good quality legal services.
“We have also seen excellent examples of solicitors reflecting on their practice and recording their learning and development.”
Some 606 solicitors told the SRA last year they had not met the declaration requirements when renewing their practising certificates.
In most cases, the regulator accepted the reasons provided, for example because solicitors had not practiced due to illness or maternity leave.
“We followed up on a small number of declarations where the reason provided was not clear. In each case, we were satisfied with subsequent assurances that competence had been maintained.”
On ethics, the SRA said it had launched “a listening exercise” in spring this year to gather insights from the profession and others in the legal sector.
“This explored the factors driving unethical behaviour, and what can be done to address them, including through providing greater support to those we regulate.”
The SRA was carrying out work to “refine how we support those we regulate to meet their professional ethical duties”, “better address the drivers of unethical behaviour” and “reflect the realities of modern legal practice”.
The SRA is currently considering responses to its consultation on beefing up the rules around continuing competence, which would introduce compulsory annual three-hour ethics discussions, compulsory recording of learning and development, and new powers for the regulator to direct that specific training is undertaken where it has competence concerns.
Lucy 
A 48% rise in competence reports is a startling number, but the SRA’s detail matters more than the headline: problems cluster in high-volume transactional work. In my experience that’s rarely about people not knowing their job — it’s caseload pressure meeting thin checking processes, so the missed step only surfaces when something goes wrong. The firms that treat second-pair-of-eyes checks as designed process rather than heroics tend to stay off the SRA’s radar and the fraudsters’ too. Are others seeing error rates track caseload this year?