
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) has handed Locke Lord its largest ever financial penalty imposed on a law firm, fining the US-based firm £500,000 after one of its former UK lawyers engaged in ‘dubious financial arrangements’ with a client’s bank account.
The lawyer in question, Jonathan Denton, had left Locke Lord in October 2015. Details of the decision published this week by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) disclose that the firm had ‘failed to prevent’ Denton from using a client account for ‘transactions that bore the hallmarks of dubious financial arrangements’.