26 August 2026

The SRA's proposal on Mandatory Ethics training has divided opinions. Is there another way with new AI tools?

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Matthew Borg

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The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) opened a consultation in April 2026 that it describes as the most significant change to continuing competence since it scrapped mandatory CPD hours a decade ago. Front and centre is a new requirement: every solicitor would have to take part in at least three hours a year of facilitated group discussion about ethical dilemmas.

The intent is easy to sympathise with: the SRA wants solicitors talking to each other about ethics regularly, not just absorbing it once at qualification and hoping it sticks. No one disputes that goal.

What has proved far more contentious is the how. Since the consultation opened, regional law societies, a national representative body, and one of the UK's leading legal ethicists have all raised the same underlying worry from different angles: that a well-meaning idea has been built with a design that could backfire.

Note: This is a live consultation proposal, not a current legal requirement. It closed for responses on 15 July 2026, and any resulting rule change still needs Legal Services Board approval before it could take effect.

What is being proposed

Under the draft rule, solicitors would need to complete a minimum of three hours of ethics discussion annually, in groups of between three and 12 people, facilitated by a solicitor with at least three years' post-qualification experience and a clean disciplinary record. Firms, local law societies, or commercial providers could organise the sessions. The SRA wouldn't accredit facilitators or approve content, and it would offer optional materials, but nothing mandatory.

The criticism

It's expensive, and the cost falls on fee-earning time. Birmingham Law Society, representing 9,000 members, called the plan overly prescriptive and estimated the direct cost of running sessions across the profession at around £4.5 million, before counting the far larger opportunity cost of lost fee-earning time, which it put at roughly £80 million a year. The national Law Society separately reported one large firm valuing its own lost productivity at £1.2 million. The Association of Personal Injury Lawyers went further, calling the requirement “overly burdensome and arbitrary”, and arguing firms should be able to certify their own ethics discussions in whatever format already works for them, rather than follow a rigid SRA template.

The facilitator rule locks out some of the best-qualified people to run it. Restricting facilitation to solicitors with three-plus years' standing excludes barristers, CILEX lawyers (Chartered Institute of Legal Executives), compliance professionals, and legal ethicists who happen to hold a different professional title. UCL's Centre for Ethics and Law pointed out something uncomfortable in the other direction too: there's substantial evidence, including from the SRA's own thematic reviews, that solicitors don't automatically have strong or current knowledge of their ethical obligations either. Seniority and ethical expertise aren't the same thing.

There's no quality control, but it isn't a free-for-all either. One of the sharpest critiques came from Professor Steven Vaughan, a solicitor and legal ethicist writing on his Lawyer Watch blog, who described the facilitator rule as creating an informal accreditation system while insisting it isn't one. Commercial providers face no SRA oversight of their content, and a senior partner facilitating a session for their own junior colleagues creates an obvious problem: it's hard to have a candid conversation about a partner's own biggest client with that partner in the room.

The deepest worry is that it becomes theatre rather than substance. UCL's Centre for Ethics and Law warned the proposal risks becoming a box-ticking exercise unless firms build real supporting infrastructure around it, arguing the SRA had paid insufficient attention to the actual building blocks of ethical behaviour, like moral courage and the willingness to speak up, as opposed to simply covering the rules again. Vaughan's phrase for the risk was blunter still: "compliance theatre". He pointed to Victoria's own Legal Services Board, which found that a similarly fixed, points-based CPD scheme reinforced exactly the box-ticking problem it was meant to solve, which is the same failure that led the SRA to abandon mandatory CPD hours in 2016. His view is that a scheduled group chat, however well-intentioned, cannot change the incentives and pressures inside a firm that drive unethical behaviour.

Smaller players are also worried about practicalities. Sole practitioners, in-house teams, and small firms may simply struggle to assemble a compliant group at all, and one commentator worked out that a single large City office running groups of twelve would need around 80 sessions a year to stay compliant: the equivalent of six hours of ethics discussion every week, all year round.

A different way to meet the same goal

Ignoring the suggested format, what the SRA is aiming to build is straightforward: solicitors who have practised working through a difficult ethical judgement call, not simply read about one. That's a worthwhile goal. The question the criticism raises is whether a scheduled, three-hour, in-person group session is the best way to get there.

There's a strong case for a complementary approach, made possible by new technology for learning: AI-driven ethical decision-making scenarios, delivered through an LMS, that a solicitor works through individually, at their own pace and in their own time.

Here's why that design addresses several of the specific concerns raised, rather than just sidestepping them:

1. It's harder to fake engagement. An evolving scenario that requires an actual decision and justification for that decision, and then shows the consequence of that decision against real regulatory principles, can't be passively attended the way a group session can. That's a direct answer to the box-ticking concern, because the exercise itself requires active participation, not just attendance. Active participation in the face-to-face session is another proposed SRA requirement, but would be difficult to measure objectively.

2. It removes the expertise lottery. Instead of quality depending on which solicitor happens to be facilitating that day, every scenario is built consistently against the same foundation: the Statement of Solicitor Competence, current SRA warning notices, and real thematic findings. This could help ensure means content quality wouldn’t vary facilitator to facilitator.

3. It takes the audience out of the room. A solicitor can work through a scenario involving pressure from a supervising partner, or a difficult client relationship, without that same partner sitting across the table. That's a genuine answer to the power-dynamics problem raised about live facilitation.

4. It personalises the ethical dilemma. A solicitor can be emersed in a custom scenario designed specifically for her area of the law, her seniority, and size of firm.

5. It solves the sole practitioner and in-house problem outright. No group of three to 12 people needs to be assembled at all, which removes the single biggest practical barrier smaller firms and in-house teams face with the proposal as drafted.

6. It fits around the working day instead of against it. Shorter, spaced sessions that a solicitor completes between matters are a materially different cost proposition to a firm than clearing three consecutive fee-earning hours, and they travel well across time zones, part-time schedules, and parental leave returns.

7. It's an accessible alternative. For solicitors who find real-time group discussion difficult, whether due to verbal or auditory processing needs, or simply a preference for reflecting before responding, self-paced, written scenario work is a legitimate alternative format, not an afterthought.

To see an example of how these types of scenarios could be delivered, visit https://www.breeio.com/ethics-scenario/

It's worth being clear about the limits with this AI scenario approach. As currently drafted, the SRA's proposed rule requires a live, facilitated group discussion, so self-paced scenario work wouldn't, on its own, satisfy the letter of the proposed rule as it stands today. The more realistic near-term role for this kind of tool is as genuine preparation or as a record of active participation.

But it's also worth watching the consultation outcome closely. Several respondents, APIL most explicitly, are asking the SRA to let firms certify ethics discussions in whatever format genuinely works for them, rather than prescribing one rigid structure. If that flexibility makes it into the final rule, well-designed, evidence-based individual scenario training stops being a supplement and becomes a legitimate way to meet the requirement.

Either way, the underlying lesson holds regardless of how this specific consultation lands: the goal was never really "three hours in a room." It was solicitors who've practised making a hard call before they're faced with one for real. That's worth building towards, one way or another.

Note: This article discusses an SRA consultation proposal (open 22 April–15 July 2026) which is not yet in force and remains subject to Legal Services Board approval.

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