Court contempt opinion highlights professional obligation to co-operate

Today the court has published its opinion in relation to a contempt of court hearing regarding a practitioner who did not comply with a statutory request for information to allow a complaint to be investigated. Raising a petition with the court is the only route available to the SLCC to enforce compliance with its statutory requests.

Commenting on the case, Neil Stevenson, CEO, said, “We welcome the court’s statements about the impact of this non-compliance on those who bring complaints to us, on the Commission’s work, and on the financial and reputational cost to the legal profession. Every solicitor in Scotland is paying for court action which should be unnecessary. Even where we are able to recover costs – and that is by no means guaranteed – hundreds of hours of staff time are lost to chasing solicitors for responses, instructing legal action and attending multiple court hearings.

“The SLCC has adopted a neutral stance in relation to contempt of court hearings. It is ultimately for the court, in individual cases and more broadly as the ultimate regulator for the legal profession, to decide whether non-compliance with statutory duties and court orders by a regulated professional meets the test of contempt of court.

“However, we note that the court’s decision focuses solely on whether actions are “deliberate” or “wilful”, and not wider compliance with regulatory duties. However, we are now seeing a pattern where solicitors are pleading that the management of their practice is so poor that failure to comply was not wilful. In this case, the court noted that the information required included “a large and disordered collection of loose leaf papers in folders” and that compliance was delayed due to an “unforeseen inability” to access files which had been deposited with an offsite storage facility.

“We believe that in this case, as in previous cases, evidence was led which raises serious public protection concerns about the management of legal practices, and we’re asking both the Law Society of Scotland, and the court, as ultimate regulator of the legal profession, to outline how this will be tackled to protect the public and reduce the appalling costs of non-compliance to the profession.”