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The Solicitors Regulation Authority has received “too many” compliance officer nominations where the individuals concerned have failed to disclose serious disciplinary issues that make them unsuitable for the role, as it warns that hundreds of firms will start 2013 without officers in place.

Our regular round-up of important news nuggets includes the newest SRA-licensed ABS, an advice contract for the Co-op, a survey of top firms on how they are changing, a probe of SRA files to identify any racial discrimination, heavy fine for spam texters and much more.

It has been a week of strong words. First of all we had Bar Council chairman Michael Todd QC sounding off about the Legal Services Board, and then on Tuesday Solicitors Regulation Authority chairman Charles Plant was uncompromising about his view of the “small but significant” number of solicitors who are not good enough to be in practice. Let’s start with Mr Plant, who does like to drop the occasional grenade to liven things up. In some ways it is hardly controversial to suggest that out of nearly 130,000 practising solicitors, there are some bad apples – but the problem appears a lot bigger than that.

Posted by Barbara Hamilton-Bruce, director of operations at Accident Advice Helpline: I regularly sit down with people from teams across the business to talk about the performance of law firms on our panel and firms that have made enquiries about membership. One of the agenda subjects is ‘quality’. It’s a hard thing to define but generally we are asking ourselves ‘does what we have learnt since the last meeting that may change our view of any of our panel firms, past or present?’. We talk about many things but pay a lot of attention to customer feedback, good and bad.

Compliance officers for legal practice (COLPs) should be allowed to buy in independent external advice at their firm’s expense in the event of a conflict with management, according to two senior solicitor consultants.