The Solicitors Regulation Authority has been forced to require panel firms tasked with assessing complaints about solicitors to amend misleading correspondence.
Law firms to which the SRA has outsourced the work have been sending letters on SRA letterheads and signed by individuals described as ‘Investigation Officer, Solicitors Regulation Authority’. The second paragraph of letters sent to people who are subject to complaints begins: ‘I am an investigation officer at the SRA’.
The outsourced firms have no authority to investigate or call themselves investigators and should have made clear they were acting as ‘assessment officers’. The SRA has now insisted that firms working on its behalf do not refer to themselves as investigation officers.
The misleading correspondence was flagged by regulatory specialist and solicitor advocate Jayne Willetts, a member of the Law Society’s regulatory processes committee and former chair of the Birmingham Law Society professional regulation committee.
In a Linkedin post, Willetts said those who receive a letter to say there has been a report of professional misconduct against them would have no idea that the assessment work had been outsourced.
‘An individual employed by an external law firm is not an investigation officer at the SRA,’ said Willetts. ‘One suspects that the SRA’s objective in adopting this modus operandi is to deceive the recipient into believing that they are dealing directly with the SRA – the risk being that if the recipient knew that they were dealing with an external law firm then they would refuse to co-operate with the investigation.’
Willetts said there are concerns around a lack of transparency and client confidentiality, with firms receiving these letters not being aware they are sharing potentially privileged information with a third-party law firm.
She said she had come across three examples of this practice during the past six weeks while dealing with investigation work for law firm clients. She has written to the SRA urging it to change its procedures.
Willetts added: ‘The point here is that some law firms will not be concerned if the investigations are being carried out by external firms, but others will. The present arrangement means that our regulated community does not have the choice. I do not assert for one moment that the SRA is not entitled to outsource work merely that it should make clear that it is doing so. The SRA routinely outsources interventions, SDT prosecutions and civil litigation but in those cases we all know who we are dealing with.’
The outsourcing of assessments follows a significant increase in reports to the SRA. Between 2022 and 2025, the number of misconduct reports assessed rose by 45% to 16,499.
Three of the SRA’s intervention panel firms have provided around 50 staff to help with the assessment process to see if complaints warrant further investigation. Only if that is the case would the subjects of the complaints be considered ‘under investigation’, and any investigation would only be undertaken by SRA staff.
An SRA spokesperson said: ‘Those contracted have been done so through the same procurement process that other work would use, including addressing risks like conflict and confidentiality. They are effectively in-house staff, carrying out the work using SRA systems.
‘However we have acknowledged Ms Willetts’ point that they are not investigation officers and they now say they are working on our behalf instead.’
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