Supervision in law firms – 10 practical tips
There are a lot of horror stories that underline the importance of supervision. How about, for starters:
- The partners who were fined for letting a non-lawyer have sole, unsupervised conduct of a group litigation involving 1,500 clients.
- The sole practitioner who failed to supervise his caseworker, incorrectly thinking he was a barrister.
- The partners whose supervision failures resulted in a paralegal stealing £400,00.
Although you may read these and think ‘that will never be me!’, it is vital to ensure you have robust systems in place in the first instance.
In this post, Samantha Bray looks at the SRA’s supervision requirements (it’s a personal obligation), training your supervisors, the role of the COLP and remote working, and gives 10 practical tips to implement an effective supervision system.
What is a Regulation 21 independent audit and why do we need one?
Carly Fallon discusses the often-overlooked ‘independent audit’ requirement of the Money Laundering Regulations.
See also this week’s webinar on Regulation 21, below.
News and Guidance
Law Society Updates
Other Updates
Webinars
Regulation 21 of the Money Laundering Regulations
Massive thanks to all the attendees at this week’s AML webinar, and to Rachael Eyre for guiding us through the requirements. In this session we covered:
- What to take into account when deciding whether Regulation 21 applies
- Appointing a MLCO, and how the role is different to the MLRO
- Employee screening (onboarding and ongoing)
- The independent audit (how, who, how often)
- The other bits of Regulation 21
Recording
The Zoom recording is available here (passcode Ir5ea7?Y) – the link will self destruct in 30 days.
Disciplinary decisions
- Duncan Peter Burtwell – struck off for misleading the court in a claim against a police authority.
- Harjit Dlay – rebuked for inappropriately varying a deed of trust.
- Rajesh Virdee – rebuked for failing to cooperate with an SRA investigation.
- Simon Langford – rebuked for failing to cooperate with an SRA and Legal Ombudsman investigation.
