Access Legal helps Stowe Family Law stay compliant
Stowe Family Law is the biggest family law practice in the UK. Having fewer than 20 offices in 2017, it grew rapidly — and since December 2023 boasts more than 80 offices across the UK. This follows the acquisition of Crisp & Co, which added 14 offices in the South of England.
However, such rapid and continued growth brings challenges and risks. As Samantha Argyle, head of risk and compliance at Stowe Family Law says: “The biggest risk for us at the moment is keeping up with the growth and the risks that arise from it.”
“Especially following what happened with Axiom Ince, we need to make sure we’re doing everything that we should be doing, that the regulator expects us to be doing and to proceed with caution.
“With this growth it also means more fee earners, more clients — which generally means more complaints and queries for my team to deal with — and more lawyers to support, ensuring everybody is doing what they should be doing.”
How Access Legal helps Stowe Family Law to remain compliant
Access Legal provides a range of solutions to law firms to help drive compliance excellence, including case and practice management systems to help work on and record files compliantly, best-in-class legal compliance e-learning, compliance management software and a range of risk and compliance services, all of which are products and services used by Stowe Family Law.
Managing files remotely
“Many of us work from home, so having a cloud-based practice management system like Access Legal Proclaim means we in the compliance team readily have access to all of our files remotely to get the information we need without having to bother fee earners. Having this remote access is essential when the firm is so broad in terms of locations across the UK, as it wouldn’t be feasible for us to visit each location to audit files.”
Data protection review
Data protection is a key risk for many law firms, and one of the services the Access Legal risk and compliance team offers is a data protection review. Our experts will look at your data protection processes and let you know where you might be falling short, with practical advice for how to rectify it. Stowe recently took this services where risk and compliance associate Rhiannon Davies carried out the review.
Argyle says: “It’s a good way to get someone else to tell you whether or not you’re where you need to be, or improvements need to be made. The thing being a law firm and dealing with the regulator is that you’re expected to know and be able to apply everything, and get on with it — which you do, but you don’t really know if it’s right. And until the regulator comes along and does an audit, you won’t really know if it’s right. So it’s great to get the opinion of somebody else external to the firm, who’s had experience with other firms, to see whether we are where we need to be.
“Rhiannon was great. She sent a checklist of things she wanted us to send over, confirmed timeframes, and the results of the review were really easy to digest, a great help, and we’re now looking at taking an AML review. As much of our work is financial remedy work, it falls within money laundering regulations, but there’s very little guidance on how those regulations apply to family firms — so again, it would be great to get that external opinion.
I’ve also found the compliance helpline to be a great help as we’re able to bounce around ideas and get a sense-check on things, so it gives us reassurance that we’re on the right track and that we have support when we need it.”
Continuing competence
“We’re part of the upcoming thematic review on how lawyers keep up with their professional obligations and continuing competence, and we’re pretty confident about that because we use Access Legal’s ‘GRC for law firms’ compliance training package. We also have a policy that everyone records all their learning, training and development on the Access Workspace training portal. That means we’ve instantly got it to hand, we can check it, do audits, and check to make sure everybody’s plans are where they need to be.”
Managing compliance
“We use the Access Legal Compliance Management system to record data breaches and subject access requests — so mainly the GDPR modules — but we also record gifts and hospitality in the gifts register. We can then use all the extensive reports from the system, which really simplifies the way we manage our compliance and helps us to identify where there may be any training needs or things that need improvement.
Simplify compliance
Whenever a law firm grows, so does its risk profile, never more so than when that growth is through mergers and acquisitions. New firms acquired may have a very different risk appetite, different cultures and ways of working and recording. That’s why it’s so important to have robust policies and procedures in place and the right technology to make sure that managing compliance is as simple as possible and scales with the growth of the law firm.
This is something Stowe Family Law has achieved by partnering with Access Legal for a range of products and services, benefiting from the breadth of experience to enhance and simplify the way they do compliance at scale.
