The head of the Solicitors Regulation Authority has said the organisation will lean less on enforcement in the future as report numbers continue to rocket.
Sarah Rapson, who became chief executive of the SRA in November, told the Law Society risk and compliance conference today that she wants the regulator to change its approach from penalising firms to trying to support them.
Rapson has repeatedly spoken of her wish to take the SRA in a new direction since coming into the role. She expanded on that different focus before an audience of hundreds in London.
‘We are pretty enforcement-led, we reach for investigation and enforcement quite quickly because instinctively we don’t go for other tools,’ she said. ‘I am really keen to test whether we as a regulator could do more to support people to be able to comply, and use other tools stopping short of enforcement to get people over the line.’
She insisted the regulator will be ‘hard-hitting on people letting the profession down’ but said the shift away from relying on enforcement should be felt over the next year.
Giving examples, Rapson said in the high-volume claims market the SRA will do more to issue warning notices before going down the route of enforcement against firms. On Mazur, where firms and individuals may be concerned about the regulatory repercussions of having unlawfully conducted litigation, Rapson said the SRA will not come down heavily on anyone inadvertently breaching the rules.
‘We are not in the business of coming after people who have made mistakes,’ she added.
The conference heard that part of the reason for less reliance on enforcement was the unprecedented number of reports being made about solicitors. In December, the regulator received 3,000 separate reports - a substantial increase since the period from November 2024 to July 2025, when the SRA received an average of 1,303 reports per month. This was 27% more than in the same period the previous year.
The existing regulatory model was ‘not sustainable’ in the light of these figures, and ‘keeping on carrying on the way we are operating is not going to tackle that [number of reports] in a very sensible way’, Rapson said.
The SRA chief was asked about the lessons learnt from the failings in the handling of Axiom Ince and SSB Law, as well as the emerging mess from the closure of PM Law Group. Much of the criticism has focused on how the SRA failed to spot warning signs that these firms presented a risk.
Rapson said the SRA ‘shouldn’t duck’ the challenges that have surfaced since these firms went under. She added: ‘If we were getting the basics right consistently we would be far better off and [if we were] more pro-active about connecting the dots we would be in a far better position to prevent that happening.'
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