Taylor Rose: Back in compliance
National law firm Taylor Rose has been fined £160,000 for multiple breaches, including residual balances held for up to seven years and not self-reporting to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA).
The firm said the breaches primarily related to its acquisitions of practices from administration between 2018 and 2020, particularly Breeze & Wyles and McMillan Williams.
As Taylor Rose is an alternative business structure, the SRA was able to fine it more than the £25,000 limit for traditional firms – the cap is £250m.
It is one of the largest handed out by the regulator to date. Until it fined the former non-solicitor owner of collapsed law firm Kingly Solicitors £4m a year ago, the highest was £232,000 to London firm Mishcon de Reya in 2022 for anti-money laundering rules breaches.
An SRA notice published today said it began a forensic investigation into Taylor Rose in August 2023.
This identified that its main client bank account had not been fully reconciled every five weeks, that the reconciliation completed on 31 July 2023 contained a significant number of unreconciled items, and that these had increased every month since April 2022 and had been carried over into subsequent months.
The firm entered into a compliance plan with the SRA and met the targets to bring its accounts into compliance in August 2025.
The specific breaches were that between April 2022 and August 2025 Taylor Rose failed to have in place effective systems and controls, between September 2022 to March 2023 failed to report possible accounts rules breaches, and from around June 2018 to August 2025 failed to promptly return client money to clients.
The breaches “continued longer than was reasonable”. In mitigation, the SRA said the firm had apologised, showed insight and remorse, and undertaken remedial action.
The SRA’s fining guidance put the figure at between 0.2% and 0.3% of its annual domestic turnover – £76m in the financial year 2023-2024 – but reduced it by 30% to reflect the mitigation.
In a statement, Taylor Rose stressed that no loss to clients was found and said it has put “robust procedures in place to prevent any future issues of this nature across the whole business, including companies it has acquired and integrated”.
It went on: “Reconciliations are now undertaken daily, and under the new case management system it is currently rolling out, will be automated with much stronger controls in place.
“The firm has also restructured its finance team to put greater focus and tighter controls on residual balances, both within the system currently in place and the incoming case management system.”
A spokesperson added: “While the issues predominantly stem from cases taken on with acquisitions of other firms between 2018 and 2020, we fully accept that we didn’t adequately deal with these issues at the time, partially due to a number of external factors impacting the capacity of our finance team.
“They have now been fully resolved, and we have since put robust procedures in place to ensure strong governance of these matters.”
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