Compliance & Regulation

The Legal Services Board not only has “the right to act” to improve diversity in the legal profession, but is under “a duty to act”, its new chief executive has said.

Only one in 10 law firms handling financial services mis-selling matters will have to pay the new £250 case fee to the Financial Ombudsman Service, it has estimated.

Barristers must be “circumspect” in exercising their free speech when speaking about controversial matters, the director general of the Bar Standards Board has said.

A partner who misled his clients for two years about the status of their claim – leading them to believe it had been issued when it had not been – has been struck off.

The Legal Ombudsman is bucking the wider trend of requiring staff to spend more time in the office and is instead halving it to the equivalent of one day a week.

The Law Society and the Bar Council have strongly attacked plans by the Legal Services Board to increase its budget by 14% to over £6m for the year ahead.

The High Court has rejected a solicitor and his client’s bid to challenge the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office’s refusal to entertain their complaints about three Court of Appeal judges.

The SRA yesterday handed out a fine and a rebuke for breaching undertakings, one relating to property transactions and the other to a divorce matter.

The evidence “does not support anxiety about standards” for qualifying as a barrister, despite rising numbers seeking to do so, the Bar Standards Board has said.

The profession has come out strongly against Legal Ombudsman plans for a 10% budget hike, arguing that throwing more money at it has not worked to date.

The director of a law firm and the firm itself have each been fined £25,000 for a series of compliance failures, including widespread accounts rule breaches and anti-money laundering shortcomings.

The regulator of CMCs has highlighted poor service standards, inappropriate sourcing of customers and misleading advertising as among its key areas of concern.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has come under fire for closing a complaint about a law firm that represented a Russian warlord without any further action.

The collapse of an Anglo-Scottish law firm in 2021 continues to have significant reverberations, with the firm that took on its business now under close scrutiny from the SRA.

A significant appeal that should decide whether a breach of the Money Laundering Regulations is also a breach of the SRA code of conduct starts in the High Court today.