Authorities which did not say what they were said to say

This digest relates to cases published by the respective regulators during week ending 4 September 2026 which have sufficient detail to allow us to comment.

The Tribunal judgment in SRA v Abhishek Kumar (case number 12884) deals with two sets of allegations against a registered foreign lawyer. The first arose from a criminal conviction: he employed, cash in hand and over a period of months, a man he had himself represented on immigration matters and whose application for leave to remain had been finally refused on 1 November 2019. The offence date pleaded was 19 August 2020, when Home Office investigators attended the firm and found the man working there. He was convicted of an offence contrary to section 21(1) and (2) of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 and sentenced to a 12 month community order with 150 hours of unpaid work. Dishonesty was not alleged.

The second allegation arose from the way he defended the first. His formal Answer cited authorities which did not exist, were wrongly cited, were misquoted, or did not support the propositions for which they were cited. When the regulator drew his attention to the Divisional Court’s judgment in R (Ayinde) v London Borough of Haringey [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin) and asked for copies of the cases, his reply was itself drafted using generative artificial intelligence and contained further errors. He then accepted that he could not provide the authorities he had relied on.

This was the first time a lawyer’s use of artificial intelligence in legal proceedings had been litigated before the Tribunal, and its reasoning is deliberately not confined to the technology. Culpability was very high. The Tribunal recorded, as a matter of principle, that “a lawyer is always responsible for the accuracy of his or her output”, and it placed culpability at that level because the conduct was repeated after the errors had been pointed out and explained, giving very substantial weight to that repetition. The same issue, the Tribunal recorded, might arise from a common search engine or from work produced by another person. He relied in mitigation on intensive mental health treatment, bereavement and severe financial hardship; the Tribunal found the medical material insufficient to support the contention that his mental capacities were impaired to the extent that he was exonerated from complying with his duties. He was struck off the Register of Foreign Lawyers.

Competence mapping

Competences B2b, B2c and B2d require solicitors to use appropriate methods and resources to undertake legal research, to identify, find and assess the relevance of sources of law, and to interpret, evaluate and apply the results. Research is not finished when a citation appears; it is finished when the source has been found and read, and its content and relevance to the case verified. Indeed, competence A5c requires the quality and reliability of information to be evaluated, and competence B5d requires appropriate reference to legal authority. Competences A2d and A2e require an up to date understanding of relevant law, policy and practice, and adaptation to developments in the delivery of legal services.

The practical point is the Tribunal’s own. Nothing in this decision depends on the technology; the duty is to check what goes out under your name, whatever produced it.

Over 50 years of practice, and no reconciliation since January 2022

The Tribunal judgment in SRA v John William Cruickshank (case number 12922) was dealt with on the papers by way of agreed outcome. The respondent was admitted no later than 1970 and from 2002 until the intervention was a recognised sole practitioner at Geoffrey Hill & Co, where he was also both the COLP and the COFA.

An anonymous report in August 2023 led to a forensic investigation. It found: no compliant three way client account reconciliations since January 2022; client ledgers which were handwritten, incomplete and materially out of date; no accurate list of client balances and liabilities; and no accountants’ reports since the period ending March 2021. The investigating officer identified an unresolved difference of £591,385.40 between stated client liabilities and funds held, and could not tell from the records whether that was a bookkeeping problem or an actual shortage on client account.

The practice was intervened into in October 2024 and by March 2025 the Compensation Fund had received 31 claims relating to the firm, with a likely payment out of more than £400,000. The solicitor admitted the allegations in full, including lack of integrity and recklessness, attributed the position to a period of ill health, and apologised. The Tribunal found him culpable for failing to seek help when it was clearly necessary, his responsibilities being greater as an experienced solicitor and the firm’s sole manager, COLP and COFA. He was suspended for nine months, with conditions for a further 12 months preventing him from practising as a sole practitioner, sole manager or sole owner, from being a partner or member of any authorised or recognised body, from acting as a compliance officer, from holding client money and from being a signatory on any client account.

Competence mapping

Competence D3c requires solicitors to apply the rules of professional conduct to accounting and financial matters. Rule 8.3 of the SRA Accounts Rules requires a three way reconciliation at least every five weeks, signed off by the COFA or a manager of the firm; between January 2022 and the intervention there were none. Competence D2 requires records which are accurate, complete and clear, and a handwritten ledger years out of date is not a record from which anybody can retrieve anything. The competences which matter most, though, are about the practitioner: A3b requires mistakes and difficulties to be recognised and acted on, A3c requires guidance and support to be sought, and A2c requires strengths and limitations to be evaluated accurately against the demands of the work. The Tribunal’s culpability finding is in almost those words. A sole practitioner who is also the COLP and the COFA has nobody whose job it is to notice.

What rehabilitation has to look like on paper

The Tribunal judgment in Zulfiqar Ali v Solicitors Regulation Authority Ltd (case number 12934) refused an application for restoration to the Roll. The applicant had been struck off in July 2020. The Tribunal found dishonesty in relation to his advice to a person he believed to be an immigration client, in fact an undercover reporter, on circumventing the immigration system by entering a sham marriage, and to his statement that he could prepare paperwork in support of a marriage he knew to be bogus. Separately, and without a dishonesty finding, he was found to have transferred at least £828,796 of purchaser’s deposit money to a client who, as the practitioner was aware, did not own the property, in transactions the Tribunal described as dubious or bearing the hallmarks of fraud.

The applicant offered an unqualified apology, accepted the findings without seeking to minimise them, and relied on a clean record since strike off, employment including a role as a prison officer from October 2025, unpaid assistance to friends and acquaintances, and reading legal and government websites. The Tribunal accepted his remorse and that he had taken some steps to rebuild his life, but held that the application did not remotely reach the level of evidence required in a dishonesty case. Almost none of what he relied on could be independently assessed, and he had identified no prospective role, supervisor or safeguards, so the Tribunal could not evaluate what protection would exist if he were restored. He was still within a 12 month probationary period and had produced no reference from that employer, the assistance he had given was ad hoc and not under solicitor supervision, and there was no record of courses, training or assessed continuing development. Unstructured online reading was not an adequate substitute for cogent evidence of continuing professional development in an application of this seriousness. The £15,000 appeal costs order also remained unsatisfied, and costs of £3,000 were ordered.

Competence mapping

The applicant is not a solicitor and the Statement of Solicitor Competence does not bind him, but it describes what he was being asked to evidence. Competences A2a, A2b and A2d require responsibility to be taken for personal learning and development, reflection on and learning from practice and from other people, and an up to date understanding of law, policy and practice.

The Tribunal’s complaint was not that he had learned nothing, but that nothing he had done left a trace which anybody else could examine. Every practising solicitor meets a smaller version of this problem at each annual declaration. Reading is not evidence of learning. A record of what was read, what was concluded from it and what changed in practice as a result is.

Controlling employment which is not a solicitor’s

The Tribunal judgment in Teresa Anderson v Solicitors Regulation Authority Ltd (case number 12935) dismissed an application for review of an order made under section 43 of the Solicitors Act 1974, which controls where a person who is not a solicitor may be involved in a legal practice. The order followed a conviction for harassment, a course of conduct over more than two years involving emails, social media posts and the use of her former husband’s home address on personal financial accounts, for which she was fined £750. She is an accredited police station representative whose income had derived from work for an SRA regulated firm; by the date of the hearing she had no income, the SRA having declined to determine her pending permission application until the review was resolved.

Five grounds were advanced and all were rejected, among them that the offence had been wrongly characterised as serious and that an indefinite control order was disproportionate. The Tribunal did not agree with everything the regulator had said; it described as highly speculative and tenuous the finding that the absence of remorse bore on a risk that clients, including vulnerable clients, might not receive appropriate advice. Ground 2 failed even so, because the SRA had not treated that absence as an additional punishment but had properly weighed it in the regulatory assessment of undesirability. Throughout, the question was whether the decision was wrong, or unjust because of a serious procedural or other irregularity, not whether the Tribunal would have decided it the same way. It recorded that the expiry of the restraining order without breach and the spent conviction were highly likely to weigh in her favour on a later application, whether for approval to work in legal practice or for revocation of the order. The Tribunal ordered her to pay the SRA’s costs in full in the sum of £3,411.24, leaving any question of her means to be taken up with the SRA’s Costs Recovery team.

Competence mapping

A section 43 order is protective rather than punitive. It does not shut a person out of legal practice; it requires the regulator’s prior written approval, so that the role, the working environment, the supervision and the safeguards can be looked at before the person starts. That is a competence question addressed to the employer. Paragraph 4.3 of the SRA Code of Conduct for Firms requires firms to ensure that their managers and employees are competent to carry out their role, and competences C3c, C3d and C3g require the work of others to be supervised effectively, colleagues to be kept informed of progress and expectations to be made clear.

SRA regulatory disposals in the week ending 4 September 2026

The SRA published no decisions during the week.

Closing thoughts

Three of this week’s four judgments turn on something the practitioner could not produce: the authorities he had cited, a reconciliation or a client ledger anybody could read, a record of what he had learned in six years out of the profession. Each of those is objective evidence, and its absence is what the Tribunal acted on. That is a failure of proof, not of honesty. In the artificial intelligence case dishonesty was neither alleged nor found, and the strike off followed regardless.

The Tribunal in that case took care to say that the technology was the medium and not the problem, and that the same failure could come from a search engine or from work produced by another person. That is a far more demanding proposition than a rule about one class of tool, because it does not expire when the tools change.

Two of this week’s judgments record ill health, bereavement or acute personal pressure. In one the Tribunal found the medical evidence insufficient to show that the practitioner’s capacities were impaired to the point of excusing his duties; in the other ill health was accepted in mitigation but did not answer the failure to seek help. Where practitioners are carrying that kind of load, or dealing with the stress of an investigation or of tribunal proceedings, LawCare’s free and confidential helpline, 0800 279 6888, remains available to anyone in the legal sector.

A lesson this week’s decisions teach: what can be evidenced decides not only competence but whether a person may practise at all, so the authorities, the reconciliation or the record of learning a practitioner cannot produce is what the decision will turn on.

Beyond Competence Limited, for information and educational purposes only. This digest does not constitute legal advice.