An accident of history has led to the pre-eminence of English Law throughout the world in business and property transactions. Any reputable international law firm that wants to undertake trans-national legal work across the world needs a base in London. No wonder there are now more than 180000 Solicitors operating in more than 90 jurisdictions throughout the world, most of them associated with a law firm with a London base. Meanwhile the number of barristers, the posh part of the legal profession, has stagnated at around 15000 when in the 19th Century it outnumbered the humble solicitors many times over.

The split between advocates and transactional professionals in England and Wales, fixing business and property deals for a new middle class, is the accidental historical circumstance to which I refer; and this has led to a profession well used to handling money for its clients, which is not so in mainland Europe or the US.  Third party notaries or realtors do the dirty work of dealing with the transfer of legal titles and the transfer of monies inter-bank. This creates an entirely different legal mind-set where lawyers float above the hurly burly of commerce.

Not so in our jurisdiction, where solicitors are at the heart of almost every house sale and purchase and business deal in our economy.  Huge sums of money float about and everyone trusts their lawyer to send their hard earned cash to the right place.  This is a huge tribute to the solicitor’s profession. At any one time my practice can have up to £25 million of monies entrusted to us by third parties to undertake legal transactions.  This system is backed up by insurance and a tight regulatory regime, which at times can be draconian. All this costs money yet conveyancing fees are still very reasonable considering the responsibility we take and the guarantees we provide of our integrity.

Little wonder then that UK legal practises are prime targets for fraudsters and money launderers trying to take advantage of our pivotal role. My job as our Compliance and Money Laundering Reporting Officer is to make the life of the criminal as difficult as possible. I want our practice to do the last place they will try to pass through money that is linked to crime. We put a great deal of effort in to check on clients and the sources of funds which are provided to us to make sure they are kosher; and we try to do this in a way which is not intrusive and maintains the integrity of our relationships with our clients.

This is not an easy balance to achieve but we start off by explaining the problems to our clients, our duties to look after their interests without fear or favour whilst ensuring we are not the target of criminals.  This means we have to carry out detailed checks to understand exactly who are clients are and that they are who they say they are. This is now assisted by technology which allows us to carry out checks of copy documents supplied to us to ensure they are genuine. At the same time, a detailed check is made of all official and government databases to make sure that clients do not match known individuals who might present a problem.

The more difficult part is checking the source of the funds provided to us by clients or third parties. This does mean that we do need to ask for bank statements and will seek explanations of where those funds have come from.  The idea is to build up a picture of who are clients are and how they have built up their resources to enable them to undertake the transaction for which we are helping them. This is carried out early on to ensure we do not get deep into a transaction before we satisfy ourselves as to the bona fides of our role and can make a decision about whether we want to be involved.

The vast majority of clients are only too happy to co-operate in a joint task to defeat criminality and this is exactly what we all want to achieve. Yes our role is difficult, but when clients understand the ‘why’, then they are more than happy to help make our financial system as clean as it can be.