The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) recently published a final version of its guidance for in-house solicitors. Expected for a long time...

United Kingdom Employment and HR

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The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) recently published a final version of its guidance for in-house solicitors. Expected for a long time, the guidance is intended to help in-house legal teams balance their regulatory duties and ethical expectations with the commercial reality of life in-house. It is helpful in many ways, but does it add up to the support that the in-house community needs?

More than 34,000 solicitors are now working in-house across all types of industry. The growth of the in-house community has been so pronounced in recent years that in-house solicitors now make up more than 25% of the profession.

Until relatively recently, the in-house community received little attention from our regulator, the SRA. However, with increased scale comes increased scrutiny. Recent scandals, for example at the Post Office, have also thrust the ethical role of in-house lawyers into the spotlight.

In 2023, the SRA published a review of ethics and in-house solicitors, prompting a group of GCs to sign and publish a letter openly criticising the SRA's generally positive conclusions, arguing that they understated the scale of the problem, that coming under pressure to compromise regulatory duties was a common (not a minority) issue, that in-house lawyers...

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