Understanding Compliance: Duties, Risks, and Ethical Obligations in Law Firms (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: And the question what is compliance? Well, how long is a piece of string? It comprises a whole range of duties, all of which we have to be compliant with to be on the safe side. Of course, every law firm has to have a compliance officer for legal practice, a CULP. And of course, you'll know that your CULP is notionally in charge of compliance within the law firm. And this would encompass not only the external compliance dealing with the regulators and the law, but also internal compliance dealing with staff and well-being issues within the law firm team as well. So, anybody could hack the email, change its information and deflect payments or something to somewhere else. Bank telephone frauds, people ringing up from Barclays saying, oh, no, I'm just going to have a chat with you. I noticed you sent $240,000 from a client account yesterday. Did that go okay? Oh, brilliant. Yeah. You're just about to send another $280,000 through today. I'm going to have to say, I think there's a fraud on the account. So, will you ring this number and get in touch with them and they'll put you right? And you ring the number. Now, not necessarily appreciating that if you hadn't disconnected the incoming call, before you ring the number, it'll put you back in touch with the person you were talking to before, who will then talk to you as if they were the fraud office and tell you to put money into some account that doesn't exist. It happens. As far as equality, diversity, and inclusion is concerned, and I'll also mention well-being there as well, the obligation is on the law firm to encourage equality, diversity, and inclusion at all times. And this is not only in relation to clients, but it's also in relation to the law firm staff as well. So, how we treat clients is, of course, critical to this understanding. And as a professional services law firm, we ought to be offering services to the general public without fear, favor, or any kind of prejudice. Equality is absolutely everything. It doesn't matter who the client is or what they're wanting from us. They have a right to our services without any prejudice or difficult treatment.