As your readers will be well aware, practising solicitors are currently bound by a Code of Conduct which runs to more than 200 pages. The code is being regularly amended, often making it very difficult for solicitors to know what regulatory rules they have to obey on any given occasion.

If that were not dangerous enough for practitioners, matters have taken a turn for the worse in recent days. If a solicitor consults the internet version of rule 9 of the code on the SRA website, (s)he will be informed that "rule 9 was amended on 13 November 2009 to answer a number of queries on referrals of business." That statement is incorrect, although the slip is a Freudian one. The text of the rule remains unaltered. What has changed, however, is the associated guidance. A completely new paragraph 3 of that guidance seeks, for the first time, to impose upon solicitors an obligation to advise a client if a lawful contract between the client and an introducer of personal injury work is not in the best interests of the client. That is a truly revolutionary regulatory requirement, arguably mandating a solicitor to induce a new client to breach a pre-existing lawful contract with a third-party introducer.

This is neither the time nor the place to debate the rights and wrongs of such a change. But it is a matter of deep concern that the change had been made not by an amendment to the rule, but by amending the guidance associated with the rule. The SRA espouses the principles of better regulation, among which are requirements of transparency, accountability and proportionality. For the meaning of rules to be altered by altering the guidance is neither fair to solicitors, nor consistent with the principles of better regulation.

It is to be hoped that the new board of the SRA will stamp out this undesirable practice.

Andrew Hopper QC, Gregory Treverton-Jones QC , (authors, The Solicitor’s Handbook 2009)