Rapson: Focus on delivery
The Solicitors Regulation Authority’s (SRA) chief executive has pledged a ‘back to basics’ drive that will see it focus on its core responsibilities and move to keeping law firms in compliance without having to take enforcement action.
Sarah Rapson, who took over from Paul Philip last November, told Legal Futures that she wanted the regulator to focus on doing fewer things.
Her goal was for the SRA to be “a modern, proportionate, effective and trusted regulator”.
She said: “I’ll be going to be saying that quite a lot over the next year. We’re not there yet on a number of those, but that’s the North star.”
This year was going to be about “delivery”, Ms Rapson went on. That meant “getting back to basics” and being focused.
“During 2026, it will become clear that there are some things that we haven’t got the bandwidth to do, frankly. We have got so much to do that’s so important we get right. And I’d far rather do a smaller number of those things better than try and cover the widest possible ground.
“That means that some people are probably not going to be happy with us because it might be things that are really important to them.”
Ms Rapson will sketch out what this looks like next month – but given recent events at PM Law, it seems that reform to client account will not be one of the areas deprioritised.
Another issue that cannot be ducked is the effectiveness of the SRA’s enforcement function. It has lost some high-profile cases in the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal and High Court of late – while that is an occupational hazard for any regulator, more worrying has been the award of costs against it.
Costs do not follow the event in the tribunal, given the public interest in the SRA’s use of its powers, but it will award them if there is good reason. This generally means that the SRA has gone wrong somewhere.
Ms Rapson acknowledged the criticisms. “When I talk about getting back to basics, that would include making sure we’re… bringing the right cases in the right way.”
Jonathan Peddie, the SRA’s executive director of legal and enforcement, is also a newcomer, having joined in September, and is reviewing the cases going to the tribunal in the coming months.
But the SRA also points out that, in 350 cases decided by the tribunal in the past three years, just 11 (or 3%) have led to adverse costs orders.
This feeds into the spiralling number [1] of concerns about solicitors being reported to the SRA and the knock-on effect it will inevitably have on the workload of the investigations team.
Ms Rapson said that while in the short term this was a resourcing issue, longer term “carrying on with the same approach is not going to be the answer”.
She went on: “I don’t think we can presume that the volumes are going to start to level off given what we’ve seen over the last year or so. So we need to think differently about what it is that we take forward post triage and the test for opening an investigation.
“We reach for the enforcement tools quite readily as a regulator. There are other ways to deal with misconduct.”
As we reported on Monday [2], the SRA has created the first iteration of a new ‘law firm profiler’, providing a single page view of key data for every law firm it regulates.
The long-term aim is to use this to focus on bringing firms back into compliance rather than having to use enforcement powers – the organisation needed “to get better at spotting risk and becoming much more proactive about potential and future harms”.
This would be a better use of the SRA’s resources, she explained: “It would only be in exception, if we really can’t get the firm over the line [into compliance], that we then move to investigation and then potential enforcement, rather than the default being let’s open an investigation, as often as we do.”
This is proportionate regulation, Ms Rapson emphasised: doing more to support firms and individuals to comply and actually only take use enforcement powers when really needed.