Hardee Consulting can help firms navigate their way through the compliance maze, the SRA Handbook, Code of Conduct, and compliance officer requests.
Specifically, Hardee Consulting’s services to legal service firms encompass:
- Regulator awareness: to develop the necessary levels of knowledge and understanding within the firm, across qualified and non-qualified staff, of the SRA’s regulator regime, and the relevant obligations under the SRA Handbook and Code of Conduct that apply to the firm and its practice
- COLP and COFA appointments: to select and train the new Compliance Officer for Legal Practice (COLP) and Compliance Officer for Financial Administration (COFA), and set up appropriate systems to enable the COLP and COFA to carry out their roles
- Regulatory gap analysis: to identify the regulatory requirements that apply to the firm and its practice, and to analyse the extent to which the firm already complies in order to identify compliance gaps
- Compliance planning: to identify the changes or additional action the firm needs to take to achieve compliance, from drafting new policies, procedures and/or documentation; preparing compliance plans and risk registers; to identifying training needs and designing appropriate training programmes.
In addition to providing consultancy services, Hardee Consulting also delivers generic and bespoke training sessions on OFR, the Handbook and Code of Conduct, which can be tailored for a particular audience, such as for risk partners, for fee earners or for business support and non-fee earning staff who are also subject to the regulatory reach of the new Handbook.