Annual Reports – Summary 2024/25
October 2026
These annual reports cover the SRA's activities from 1 November 2024 to 31 October 2025, the second reporting year of our 2023–2026 corporate strategy.
The strategy set out four objectives:
- we will deliver high professional standards
- we will strengthen our risk-based and proactive approach
- we will support innovation and technology
- we will be an authoritative and inclusive organisation, meeting the needs of the public, consumers, those we regulate and our staff.
Below we summarise our progress against those objectives. You can read more detail in our full 2024/25 Annual Report and accounts, which also includes financial statements.
Objective one: we will deliver high professional standards
The vast majority of solicitors work to high standards. However, if they fall short of what is expected, we act to keep the public safe. We do this through a range of activities. In 2024/25 we brought 104 cases to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal and intervened into and closed down 42 law firms.
We invoiced a total of 169 fines and issued 30 fixed financial penalties (FFPs), which we issue for certain rule breaches. The total value of all these fines stood at £6.4m. This includes a £4m fine, our largest ever, to the former non-solicitor owner of Kingly Solicitors, which we shut down in 2020.
To help make sure the legal sector is at the forefront of tackling money laundering and financial crime, we have increased anti-money laundering (AML) team resources and done more reviews and inspections. We took regulatory action in 151 cases, compared to 78 in 2023/24, and issued 73 fines totalling around £950,000, compared to 44 totalling around £600,000 in 2023/24.
In October 2025, the government announced the Financial Conduct Authority will become the single professional services supervisor for AML and counter-terrorism financing. We will work closely with all parties to make sure there is a smooth transition.
In certain circumstances, where money has been lost or gone missing – for instance, due to a dishonest solicitor – consumers or small businesses can apply to the SRA Compensation Fund to have it replaced. Due to more large-scale interventions, we have seen a general increase in the amount paid out from the fund. In 2024/25 it reached £47.4m.
High-profile investigations
We have more than 20 live investigations into solicitors and firms who worked on behalf of the Post Office/Royal Mail Group. We are looking at a range of issues, including solicitors' management and supervision of cases, duties relating to expert witnesses, as well as others.
Investigating suspected misconduct relating to abusive litigation, including strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs), has been a growing area. Since 2022, we have received approximately 300 reports about abusive litigation, some raising allegations of SLAPPs, and have proceeded to formal investigation in 97 cases. Of these, 31 remain open.
We continued investigations into SSB and Pure Legal – former clients of the firms had been unexpectedly asked to pay adverse legal costs in relation to their discontinued cavity wall insulation claims. We also initiated a review into the wider high-volume consumer claims (HVCC) market. As of 31 October 2025, we had 76 open investigations relating to 61 firms, and between April 2024 and September 2025 we closed down six firms. In October 2025, the Legal Services Board (LSB) published a report about our handling of SSB. We accepted the recommendations, and we apologised for not acting more quickly.
Making changes
After extensive stakeholder engagement, in November 2024 we consulted on potential changes to consumer protection measures, with a focus on better protecting client money. In October 2024, we published our response to the LSB's report on events prior to our intervention into Axiom Ince. Following this report, the LSB published directions setting out changes we should make. We have already made progress on these directions, in particular through our Consumer Protection Review and Risk and Data Programme.
Around one-in-five solicitors work in-house. In November 2024, following engagement through a range of methods, we launched guidance tailored for them which has been viewed more than 10,000 times. We also hosted a series of events for the in-house community in 2025, attracting almost 1,700 participants.
In May 2025, we consulted on changes to help law firms further improve how they manage complaints. Implementation of the changes will require LSB approval in 2025/2026.
We published a thematic review into the HVCC market and found a range of problems. After this we opened investigations into nine firms and wrote to more than 700, sharing concerns. In September 2025, we published a discussion paper on tackling market challenges.
We further developed our resources on continuing competence and published our third annual assessment, which showed most solicitors completed learning and development, and firms have robust systems and controls in place. However, there are areas for improvement where we will consider what further work we can do and consult on our proposed approach.
The Solicitors Qualifying Examination
2024/25 was the fourth year of the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE), delivered on our behalf by Kaplan. Of the 9,751 individuals admitted in 2024/25, 38% qualified through the SQE. An increase from 2023/24, when it was 27%. Most still qualify through the Legal Practice Course, but this route will be phased out in the coming years.
The annual report from the SQE's Independent Reviewer, covering January to October 2024, concluded the delivery of the assessment was good, noting improvements on previous years, and that the outcomes delivered were fair and defensible.
Objective two: we will strengthen our risk-based and proactive approach
To support our shift in supervision approach to proactively identifying and acting on risks before they lead to public harm, we are significantly increasing investment in data, intelligence and risk-scanning capabilities, and bolstering our enforcement resources.
We have already started to expand our data analysis use, such as in 2024/25 developing an AML model that uses machine learning to predict the money laundering risk of a firm.
We carried out thematic reviews in areas where we are seeing risks, such as high-volume consumer claims, first-tier complaints handling, professional obligations, and probate and estate administration. In a project to check compliance with our Transparency Rules, we reviewed more than 2,000 firms, and as of the end of October 2025, have issued 838 warnings and 55 FFPs.
Objective three: we will support innovation and technology
We progressed our work on innovation and AI, including further developing our regulatory approach and publishing case studies to build understanding in our regulated community. We also commissioned research on the rise of consumer-facing AI and published research on sole practitioner and small firm use of technology and innovation, the findings of which are helping to shape our approach for this part of the market.
In May 2025, we authorised the first AI-driven law firm, Garfield.Law Ltd. We worked closely with it, pre-authorisation, to make sure it could meet our rules and have stayed in regular contact to monitor potential risks and benefits.
Our involvement in cross-regulator and government-led forums, including the LawtechUK Regulatory Response Unit and the Information Commissioner's Office's Regulators AI Working Group also continued.
We delivered targeted events for small firms that brought together legal professionals, tech providers and regulators. More than 180 delegates attended our Innovate events, with 91% saying they found them useful or very useful.
Objective four: we will be an authoritative and inclusive organisation, meeting the needs of the public, consumers, those we regulate and our staff
We continued to focus on consumer-facing tools and content. This included completing the design and build stages of a digital tool to help consumers find legal services providers in England and Wales. In September 2025, we completed implementation of recommendations from an independent website audit, which improved the user experience and how we communicate our work. There were increased visits to our consumer-facing web pages, with our Solicitors Register particularly popular. It attracted 9.4 million views in 2024/25, a 3% increase compared to 2023/24 and 99% of around 4,000 users said they found it useful, when asked. Views of our scam alerts also increased by 15%, from 192,000 in 2023/24 to 220,000 in 2024/25. Legal Choices, the consumer-facing website we manage on behalf of all legal regulators in England and Wales, had 1.9 million visits, up 19%.
With our Contact Centre already accredited by the Institute of Customer Service, we extended our customer service plans into more operational areas of the business. We extended our 'voice of the customer' initiative into our Client Protection team, which has enabled us to obtain customer feedback on the compensation fund claims process.
Equality, diversity and inclusion
Following our research on potential causes of differential outcomes by ethnicity in legal professional assessments we published a targeted action plan. We are finalising a plan to address issues raised by our research on overrepresentation of Black, Asian and minority ethnic solicitors in the early stages of our enforcement processes.
We have continued our work to encourage diversity at senior levels in law firms, such as by hosting a webinar on ethnicity pay gap reporting and engaging with law firms to create resources on race equality in the workplace and pay gap reporting. We continued to collect broader diversity data from law firms.
Investigation and enforcement – timeliness of work
We aim to assess 80% of reports we receive about solicitors and law firms within two months. Where in 2023/24 we hit this target for all four quarters, a significant increase in reports meant we were unable to in 2024/25. We have sought to manage this increase through improved ways of working and extra temporary resource. This increased the average number of reports being resolved each month by 28%. We will continue to manage the situation through additional short-term measures and have also started a strategic improvement project.
In 2024/25, we generally met or exceeded our target for completing investigations:
- 93% of investigation cases within 12 months – we hit this target in 11 of the 12 months, compared to all 12 months in 2023/24
- 95% of investigation cases within 18 months – we hit this target in 11 of the 12 months, compared to all 12 months in 2023/24
- 98% of investigation cases within 24 months – we hit this target in 10 of the 12 months; this is the same as in 2023/24.
A key priority has been to reduce cases open for more than 24 months, and we have made good progress. In October 2023 we had 161 such cases, in October 2025 we had 60.