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Codes of conduct: clarity needed?

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02 December 2022 / John Gould
Issue: 8005 / Categories: Features , Profession , Regulatory , Disciplinary&grievance procedures
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The cleaner did it! John Gould considers the rules & responsibilities which apply to non-solicitor employees of a firm
  • Every employee within a firm is a regulated person, whether or not they are personally engaged in reserved legal activity. In principle, this means that individual employees who are not legal professionals could be made subject to rules and punished for breaches.
  • While the Solicitors Regulation Authority sets out a Code of Conduct for solicitors and firms, it is not clear which rules apply to individual employees.

Legal firms employ a lot of people. According to a report by KPMG commissioned by the Law Society, in 2018 there were many more than 225,000 people employed in the ‘legal activities’ sector in the UK (‘Contribution of the UK legal services sector to the UK economy’, January 2020). Over the last four years, this number is likely to have grown. Many of these employees are not themselves lawyers, but still deal with clients and their money every day.

But what

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