The SRA’s enforcement powers have expanded significantly in recent years. In 2022, the SRA’s maximum fine for authorised firms increased from £2,000 to an unlimited amount (for the most serious cases), and the maximum fixed penalty for less serious matters was raised to £25,000. The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal retains jurisdiction over the most serious cases and can impose unlimited fines, conditions on practice, and strike-off.

Understanding how the SRA and SDT actually exercise these powers — what conduct attracts what sanction, and why — is one of the most practical compliance resources available. Case analysis reveals patterns, and patterns reveal the compliance risks that are most likely to affect your firm.

This article examines the categories of conduct that generate the most significant sanctions, analyses recent cases, and draws the lessons that every law firm should embed in its compliance programme.

The SRA’s Enforcement Framework

How the SRA Decides to Take Action

The SRA applies a risk-based approach to enforcement. Not every breach triggers formal action: the SRA must assess the seriousness of the breach, the harm caused or risked, the culpability of the individual or firm, and the appropriate outcome.

The SRA’s Enforcement Strategy (last updated 2023) sets out the factors that influence enforcement decisions:

Harm: actual harm to clients, third parties, or the administration of justice is an aggravating factor; no harm, or harm that has been remedied, is mitigating
Culpability: deliberate or dishonest misconduct is treated far more seriously than negligent or inadvertent breach
Patterns: an isolated breach is treated less seriously than a systemic failure or a pattern of similar conduct
Regulatory history: a prior disciplinary history aggravates the current breach; a clean regulatory history is a mitigating factor
Cooperation: firms and individuals who cooperate fully with the SRA investigation, self-report promptly, and take genuine remedial action receive more favourable treatment than those who are defensive or evasive

Sanctions Available

The SRA can impose a range of sanctions without referring a matter to the SDT:

A written rebuke (a formal reprimand with no financial penalty)
A financial penalty — up to £25,000 for individuals, and unlimited for firms in cases of serious breach
Conditions on a practising certificate or firm authorisation — restricting the work that can be undertaken, requiring additional supervision, or imposing reporting requirements
Referral to the SDT for the most serious cases

The SDT can impose:

Fines (unlimited)
Conditions on practice
Suspension from practice
Strike-off from the roll (removal of the right to practise as a solicitor)

Recent Enforcement Patterns: What the Data Shows

The SRA publishes an annual regulatory performance report and quarterly enforcement statistics. The data for 2023-24 shows several clear patterns.

Client Money Misappropriation

Misuse of client funds remains the most common trigger for the most serious SRA action — including intervention and SDT referral. The 2023-24 statistics showed over 40 interventions in that year, the majority involving client money issues.

Recent interventions share common characteristics: often the problem builds gradually, starting with a single instance of funds being “borrowed” temporarily from the client account to cover the firm’s cashflow needs, and escalating as the shortfall grows and the fear of discovery prevents the solicitor from disclosing it.

In one SDT case decided in 2024, a solicitor who had misappropriated client funds totalling over £300,000 over a three-year period received a strike-off and was ordered to pay costs of £45,000. The tribunal noted that the solicitor had made repeated false entries in the client ledger to conceal the shortfall, that no client had authorised the withdrawals, and that the concealment was deliberate and sustained. Mitigation based on financial pressure and depression was acknowledged but did not prevent the most serious sanction.

The lesson: client money misappropriation is treated as dishonesty, and dishonesty findings almost always result in strike-off regardless of the surrounding circumstances.

Inadequate Accounts Procedures

Below the level of outright misappropriation, the SRA takes formal action against firms with persistently inadequate accounts procedures. Common issues include:

Failure to reconcile the client account at least every five weeks
Holding client money in office account
Drawing costs from client account before bills have been delivered
Failing to pay interest on client money
Residual balances that have not been returned or paid to the SRA

In 2024, the SRA imposed a £25,000 fine on a mid-sized commercial firm following a reporting accountant’s qualified report that disclosed multiple years of reconciliation failures. The firm had been aware of the failures but had not reported them to the SRA. The fine reflected both the Accounts Rules breaches and the failure to self-report — a factor that significantly elevated the penalty.

The lesson: Accounts Rules breaches, even without dishonesty, attract significant sanctions when they are systemic or when the firm fails to self-report.

AML Failures

The SRA’s anti-money laundering enforcement programme has accelerated since the introduction of the MLR 2017 and the establishment of OPBAS. The 2023 OPBAS report on the legal sector found that around 15% of the firms it assessed had material weaknesses in their AML controls.

Typical AML enforcement cases involve firms that:

Had no firm-wide risk assessment
Were conducting insufficient client due diligence — accepting basic identification without enhanced due diligence for high-risk clients or transactions
Had not trained their fee earners on AML obligations
Could not produce records of AML checks conducted

In 2024, the SRA published a series of case studies from AML enforcement action, noting fines ranging from £5,000 to £50,000 for firms with systematic AML failures. One case involved a conveyancing firm that had accepted cash payments from clients without conducting any enhanced due diligence, and had no documented AML risk assessment. The firm received a £35,000 fine and conditions requiring implementation of a compliant AML programme within six months.

The lesson: AML compliance is not optional, and firms that treat it as a paper exercise will face enforcement action. The SRA is specifically looking for firms where the AML documentation does not match the actual practice.

Costs Transparency Failures

The SRA Transparency Rules require firms to publish price and service information on their websites in specified practice areas. Since 2022, the SRA has run periodic mystery shopping exercises to check compliance, and has taken enforcement action against firms found to be non-compliant.

Typical findings include:

No pricing information published at all
Pricing information that is too vague to satisfy the Rules (e.g., “contact us for a quote”)
Information that is published but materially out of date
Information that does not cover all required practice areas

The SRA has issued written rebukes to the majority of non-compliant firms, with financial penalties reserved for those with repeated or deliberate failures. The maximum fine for Transparency Rules breaches has been around £5,000 to £10,000 for individual firms, but the reputational impact of a public rebuke can be more significant.

The lesson: Transparency Rules compliance is straightforward to achieve and straightforward to check. Non-compliance is difficult to justify and increasingly difficult to avoid.

Dishonesty Outside Practice

The SRA takes seriously conduct outside legal practice that reflects adversely on a solicitor’s honesty or integrity. A solicitor convicted of a financial crime — fraud, money laundering, tax evasion — even in a personal capacity, is likely to face SDT proceedings. The SDT has consistently held that dishonesty outside practice is directly relevant to a solicitor’s fitness to practise.

In 2024, a solicitor who had been convicted of benefit fraud — claiming housing benefit while owning property — was struck off. The SDT held that the conviction, though unrelated to the solicitor’s professional practice, demonstrated dishonesty that was incompatible with continued practice as a solicitor.

The lesson: the conduct obligations in the SRA Standards and Regulations apply to personal as well as professional life, and dishonesty in any context carries severe professional consequences.

How the SDT Approaches Dishonesty

The Test for Dishonesty

The SDT applies the civil standard of proof (the balance of probabilities) for most allegations, but applies the criminal standard (beyond reasonable doubt) for allegations of dishonesty. This means that the SRA must prove dishonesty to a high standard — but once dishonesty is established, the presumption is that the solicitor will be struck off.

The test for dishonesty in professional proceedings follows the Supreme Court’s decision in Ivey v Genting Casinos [2017]: the tribunal asks first what the defendant’s actual state of mind was (a subjective question), and then asks whether that conduct was honest by the standards of reasonable and honest people (an objective question). A solicitor who genuinely believed their conduct was acceptable may nonetheless be found dishonest if the objective test is not satisfied.

Why Strike-Off Is the Default for Dishonesty

The SDT has repeatedly confirmed that, in cases of proven dishonesty, strike-off is the appropriate sanction in all but the most exceptional circumstances. The rationale is that the public’s confidence in the legal profession depends on solicitors being trusted with client money, confidential information, and access to the courts — and that trust cannot be maintained if solicitors who are found to be dishonest are allowed to continue practising.

This is not a rigid rule, and the SDT has in rare cases imposed lesser sanctions on dishonesty findings — typically where the conduct was at the very low end of the scale, the solicitor made full restitution, there was genuine remorse, and there was compelling personal mitigation. But these cases are genuinely exceptional.

Key Compliance Lessons

Lesson 1: Self-Report Promptly

The SRA’s enforcement data consistently shows that firms and solicitors who self-report promptly receive materially more favourable outcomes than those who conceal problems. A self-report signals that the firm has a genuine compliance culture and is willing to be accountable. Concealment signals the opposite — and when the SRA eventually discovers the issue (as it almost always does), the concealment is treated as a significant aggravating factor.

Lesson 2: Cooperate Fully With Investigations

Failing to cooperate with an SRA investigation — failing to respond to correspondence, refusing to produce documents, misleading SRA investigators — is itself a breach of the SRA’s Standards and Regulations and attracts separate sanction. Cooperation does not mean agreeing with the SRA’s characterisation of events; it means engaging honestly and promptly.

Lesson 3: Keep Good Records

A significant proportion of enforcement cases are aggravated by the firm’s inability to produce records that would support its case. A firm that conducted AML checks but cannot produce the records, or that claims to have reconciled its client account but cannot produce the reconciliations, is in a weak position. Good record-keeping is both a compliance obligation and a protection against unjustified enforcement action.

Lesson 4: Separate Financial Difficulties From Client Money

Financial pressure is one of the most common triggers for client money misappropriation. Solicitors who experience cashflow problems, business difficulties, or personal financial crises should seek help — from the SRA (which has a confidential support line), from the Solicitors Assistance Scheme, or from financial advisers — before they are tempted to address their problems using client funds. The consequences of misappropriating client money, even temporarily, are almost always worse than the underlying financial problem.

Lesson 5: Train Fee Earners, Not Just the COLP

Compliance failures arise from the conduct of fee earners, not just from inadequate systems. Regular training — on AML, on costs transparency, on the conduct obligations that apply to every solicitor — is one of the most effective investments a firm can make in its compliance programme.

Obiter reduces the risk of the administrative compliance failures that generate SRA enforcement action — keeping records accurate, billing workflows orderly, and matter documentation complete. When a fee earner is properly supported by technology that handles the administrative layer of legal practice, the time for genuine professional judgement expands, and the risk of the lapses that attract regulatory attention contracts. Explore Obiter at obiteros.com with a free 14-day trial.

SRA Fines and Sanctions: Recent Cases and Lessons for Law Firms