Compliance & Regulation

The Legal Services Board plans to increase its “capacity and capability” to launch investigations into, and reviews of, the frontline regulators “on a regular basis”.

There is a “slow but steady increase in diversity among all lawyers”, the Solicitors Regulation Authority reported yesterday in its biennial collection of the profession’s diversity data.

The SRA has postponed changes it was set to make to the accounts rules – including how money taken for costs in advance of work being done is dealt with – in light of the Axiom Ince scandal.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority still has “a long way to go” on diversity, its chief executive has said – although its gender and ethnicity pay gaps are shrinking.

One of the three Axiom Ince directors whose individual practices were shut down by the SRA has dropped his High Court challenge to the decision, Legal Futures can reveal.

Law firm innovator Alice Stephenson has turned her business into an unregulated practice, citing problems with HM Revenue & Customs and the costs of running a regulated law firm.

A struck-off solicitor has been jailed for nearly six years for defrauding clients of £880,000, which he used to prop up his practice and pay off loans.

Bullying, harassment and discrimination at the Bar is a “systemic” problem, the Bar Council said yesterday, with 44% of barristers saying they have experienced or witnessed it in the past two years.

Lawyers and CMCs making complaints to the Financial Ombudsman Service on behalf of clients will be charged for doing so in future, under plans published this week.

The Bar Standards Board is setting up a taskforce to help it cope with a surge of lawyers from Pakistan and Bangladesh seeking to be called to the Bar in England and Wales.