Far-reaching plans to allow law firms to advise rival clients on the same deal have been shelved by the Solicitors Regulation Authority following ‘significant opposition’ from senior in-house lawyers.

Relaxed conflict of interest rules were widely expected to be written into the SRA rulebook shortly after a second, shortened consultation on the matter closed in mid-February.

However, last Friday the SRA’s standards committee decided not to recommend the changes to the SRA board after this consultation drew criticism from a number of general counsel at FTSE 100 companies.

The committee did wave through proposed rule changes on confidentiality and information disclosure, which will go before the board for a final decision.

‘We are not pushing ahead with [the conflict of interest] changes for the moment because of significant opposition,’ Malcolm Nicholson, standards committee member and former partner at magic circle firm Slaughter and May, told the Gazette. He said that there was ‘some opposition from some members of the GC100,’ the body that represents in-house counsel at FTSE 100 companies, although he said other members took the opposite view.

Nicholson said that there were far more responses from consumers of legal services to the second consultation than there were to the first.

The proposed rule changes would have permitted firms to act for ‘sophisticated clients’ in ‘any situation in which there is a conflict of interest’, except litigation. The proposals followed lobbying by the City of London Law Society (CLLS), which claimed the current regime was ‘overly restrictive’ for corporate clients. The CLLS declined to comment on the news this week.

An SRA spokesman said: ‘The standards committee decided that a review of the SRA’s policy position on conflicts of interest should be undertaken as part of the [forthcoming] consultation in May on the handbook for regulating all firms.’