Website: Law firm failed to comply with requirements on transparency
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) has fined a law firm over £20,000 for failing to comply with the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s (SRA) transparency rules.
Southampton law firm David Ebert, which had previously been fined by an SRA adjudicator for transparency failures, was also found not to have had a COLP in place for over a year and a COFA in place for almost three years.
These are all individually seen as administrative breaches for which the SRA can impose fixed penalties but it would appear that the continued failure to remedy them led to the SDT referral, a very unusual move for these types of failures.
The tribunal said the law firm “accepted that it did not act quick enough to resolve the identified deficiencies”. These “had not been deliberate breaches, but ones caused by a period of transformation” the law firm was undergoing.
Nevertheless, it was “not acceptable at any time for the attention of the COLP (and other senior team members) to have been diverted by other activity and away from issues of core importance”.
In a statement of agreed facts and outcome with the law firm, the SRA said David Ebert was fined £1,300 by one of its adjudicators in August 2022, plus costs of £600, for failing to publish on its website the required information on fees and how to complain about its services.
The adjudicator imposed conditions on the firm’s authorisation requiring it to provide evidence that it was complying with the transparency rules within 30 days.
But it did not meet this deadline and continued to flout the rules by failing to specify the limitation period for complaining to the Legal Ombudsman and in relation to almost all the categories of work they cover – conveyancing, probate, immigration, motoring offences, employment tribunal work and debt recovery.
The law firm told the SRA in January 2023 that it was “actioning” the concerns but blamed problems with the hosting of the website for not rectifying it – the firm had not paid for the renewal of its domain for four years.
The regulator finally confirmed that the website was compliant early in February.
The firm also admitted failing to have a COLP in place between July 2022 and December 2023, and a COFA between November 2020 and October 2023.
One of the firm’s solicitors, Marcus Malik, told the SRA “that things must appear out of control, but the firm were working on it and had commissioned a compliance firm to assist”.
The firm accepted that it was aware of the breaches and “did not act quick enough to resolve them”.
It said in mitigation that they were “connected and ultimately were due to administrative errors and oversight rather than a deliberate attempt to circumvent the requirements of the Standard and Regulations”.
The SDT noted the law firm’s “regret that insufficient attention was paid to these important issues”, that it did not gain any advantage from the breaches and that no harm was caused to anyone.
David Ebert was fined £20,700 and ordered to pay £10,000 in costs.
Leave a Comment