Weekly highlights

SRA issues guidance to support in-house solicitors

The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has released a set of guidance materials, primarily aimed at the 34,500+ in-house solicitors across England and Wales but also including guidance on internal investigations applicable to all firms and solicitors, not just those working in-house. The guidance, developed following stakeholder feedback and a 2023 thematic review, addresses unique challenges faced by in-house legal professionals. It covers areas such as client identification, reporting wrongdoing, legal professional privilege, ethical obligations, and risk management. Notably, it includes advice for non-solicitor employers to enhance understanding of solicitors' professional obligations. The SRA has incorporated feedback from consultations on drafts of the guidance, resulting in more practical examples, expanded information on third-party work and conflicts of interest, and clearer guidance on internal investigations. The SRA aims to support in-house solicitors in navigating their roles and highlighting their value in promoting ethical behaviour within organisations.

NHS Employers updates guidance on use of settlement agreements and confidentiality clauses

NHS Employers has updated its guidance for employers on the use of settlement agreements and confidentiality clauses when resolving a workplace dispute or ending an employment contract. The guidance includes the latest information on legislative requirements, good practice examples on the freedom to speak up, guidance on Mutually Agreed Resignation Schemes, information on board members and the NHS England Fit and Proper Person Test Framework, and links to further resources.

CTJ publishes speech by Master of the Rolls on AI

The Courts and Tribunals Judiciary (CTJ) has published a speech by the Master of the Rolls, Sir Geoffrey Vos, on artificial intelligence (AI) titled ‘AI – Transforming the work of lawyers and judges’. The speech was given at the AI Conference 2024: Transforming the Legal Landscape on 8 March 2024. Sir Geoffrey Vos summarised the messages contained in judicial guidance on the use of AI and said that before using generative AI, its abilities must be understood; lawyers and judges should not feed confidential information into public large language models (LLM) as this information would theoretically be made available to the world and when an LLM is used to summarise or write something, the response must be checked before it is used. On how new technologies will affect legal practice, Sir Geoffrey Vos said that specialist legal data LLM’s would be more accurate and anyone using AI programmes must do so skillfully. Sir Geoffrey Vos noted that LLM’s have access to more and different data than humans and its opinion is worth consideration. Additionally, Sir Geoffrey Vos said that there is a need for lawyers to think outside the box as AI is quicker and may be capable of doing tasks more comprehensively than a human. It is therefore unlikely that using AI will be optional. Sir Geoffrey Vos indicated that the law may need to reconsider how liability is allocated ‘in a world of capable AI tools.’ On the topic of judicial use of AI, Sir Geoffrey Vos highlighted that the senior judiciary would not have issued AI guidance if it had not thought that judges could also be assisted by AI tools. In concluding, Sir Geoffrey Vos said that ‘AI has great potential within the digital justice system which promises to provide quicker, cheaper and more efficient ways to resolve the millions of disputes that arise in British society every year.’

Groupe Canal+ fined for commercial prospecting and breaching EU GDPR

The French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) has fined Groupe Canal+, publisher of channels and distributor of pay-television offers, €600,000 for breaching Articles 12, 13, 14, 15, 21, 28, 32 and 33 of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (EU GDPR). This follows complaints from individuals that encountered difficulties in having their rights considered in the context of commercial prospecting that Groupe Canal+ carried out.