Referral fee ban

Jack Straw’s attempt to make the payment of referral fees a criminal offence has failed (in part because of concerns over the burden of proof required). Instead the proposed ban will be dealt with by the regulators.

Dominic Regan, writing in the New Law Journal, suggests this is:

“the most sensible way of enforcing a ban upon the profession. … The risk of being struck off should ensure that the tempted do not succumb”

So the clock will be turned back to pre-2004 when the Law Society rules banned referral fees and solicitors wouldn’t dream of paying them for fear of the consequences. Unless there were panel members of Claims Direct, Accident Group, etc, etc.


One thought on “Referral fee ban

  1. Have i missed something and they have defined what a referral fee is?

    It seems to me that they will struggle to ban lots of referral fees – some come in the form of charitable donations to institutions which are publically high profile and others by way of “services offered” to those institions.

    not sure how you ban those

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>