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The first academic study of compliance officers for legal practice has found a “tendency” not to report regulatory failures to the Solicitors Regulation Authority. There was also evidence of COLPs at ABSs with mainly non-lawyer management struggling to get across the importance of following the rules.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has signalled a fresh approach to its work, with a focus on simplifying the requirements it imposes and ensuring they are proportionate.

The move by the Solicitors Regulation Authority to embrace entity-based and outcomes-focused regulation is hard to understand, major new research commissioned by the Legal Services Board and Law Society has claimed.

A number of positives are revealed in a recent survey conducted by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Most notably, a year after the implementation of outcomes-focused regulation (OFR) and perhaps understandably, firms’ attitudes are shifting towards greater levels of acceptance as they increase their experience of working with the new regime of regulation. Measuring the impact of OFR on firms, released last week, found that 50% of respondents felt ‘favourable’ about OFR, a welcome increase on the previous year’s 36%. However, that still leaves the other 50% to be convinced.

An outcomes-focused, risk-based approach to regulating the activities of most lawyers who deliver legal services in a post-Legal Services Act landscape is a fact of life. Yet you still don’t have to go far to find solicitors who either fail to grasp the concept or hanker after the old, detailed rules-based system. The degree of non-acceptance is profound, more than a year after outcomes-focused regulation came in – in October 2011. So persistent is it that the SRA may be relying on the insertion of compliance officers for legal practice and financial administration (COLPs and COFAs) into the fabric of every firm to help change attitudes.