Compliance & Regulation

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.

A male former senior client development manager at Eversheds Sutherland who repeatedly grabbed a female colleague at an away day has been barred from the profession.

The Legal Services Board is planning an unprecedented independent review of how the Solicitors Regulation Authority has handled the Axiom Ince scandal, MPs were told yesterday.

An inexperienced barrister feared seeking the court’s approval to deduct success fees from damages in infant settlement cases but told his employers he had applied for them.

Dr Charlotte Proudman has welcomed the dismissal of a police inspector who sent her and other women abusive tweets – and contrasted the action with the approach of the Bar Standards Board.

The High Court has refused to order costs in favour of a barrister who successfully reduced the suspension imposed on him for recklessly misleading the Court of Appeal.

MPs were last week asked to support a review of the Legal Services Board after the chair of the Bar Council said the oversight regulator had refused to agree to one.

A struck-off solicitor still advising clients on legal matters has failed to obtain an injunction to compel a bank to unfreeze his account over questionable payments he received from abroad.

A solicitor who acted for a property investment company and an investor has been fined just over £9,000 for breaking conflict of interest rules.

Two law firm directors who used nearly £650,000 in legal aid disbursement payments to prop up their firm, before it went bust owing other creditors a further £1.1m, have been struck off.

The first solicitor ever prosecuted by the Serious Fraud Office for ‘tipping off’ a client about a money laundering investigation has been handed a suspended prison sentence.

Nearly half of UK students on the Bar training course are now from ethnic minority backgrounds, compared to a quarter a decade ago, according to new figures.