Compliance & Regulation

A senior solicitor convicted of sexually assaulting two women in his local pub has been fined £25,000 by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

Law firms are struggling to understand the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s workplace environment rules introduced earlier this year, a leading regulatory solicitor has warned.

The government has rowed back on a proposal to introduce a single regulator for insolvency practitioners but will take statutory power to do it in future if needed.

A solicitor whose misconduct “spiralled” from maladministration to using client money to pay personal expenses, and included calling a client a “spastick”, has been struck off.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has approved new owners for an alternative business structure set up by an AIM-listed personal pension provider.

Legal regulators and representative bodies were yesterday named as members of a new government taskforce aiming to clamp down on SLAPPs.

Nearly half of consumers who have a will either wrote their own or obtained it through a cheap online service, with hardly any checking the credentials of the provider.

The government indicated this week that it would resist calls for a statutory ban on non-disclosure agreements in the workplace, having been told that lawyers “are part of the problem”.

A solicitor who told clients to pay fees into his personal bank account, in some cases for work that was never done, has been struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

Individual solicitors and their firms will be paying an extra £13.2m to be regulated and represented in the coming year, the Legal Services Board has confirmed.