Raising the bar on competence: what the SRA’s new consultation means for law firms

On 22 April 2026, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) opened a consultation titled Strengthening our continuing competence approach. It runs until 15 July 2026, and the proposals within it mark the most significant shift in how solicitors are expected to maintain and evidence their competence since the move away from mandatory CPD hours back in 2016.

If adopted, the changes will affect every SRA-regulated firm in England and Wales — and, crucially, they go well beyond the kind of tick-box training log that many firms may still rely on.

Here is what is being proposed, why it matters, and what firms should be thinking about now.

Where we are today

Since 2016, the SRA has not required solicitors to complete a set number of CPD hours. Instead, solicitors are expected to reflect on their practice, identify their learning and development needs, and address them proportionately. The Code of Conduct for Solicitors places a personal duty on every practitioner to keep their professional knowledge and skills up to date, to understand their legal, ethical and regulatory obligations, and to make sure they are competent to carry out their role.

The Code of Conduct for Firms places an equivalent obligation on firms to ensure that their managers and employees are competent.

On paper, this is a mature, reflective approach. In practice, the SRA is concerned that it is not always working as intended.

Why the SRA wants to strengthen the regime

The regulator’s own research suggests a number of blind spots. Solicitors tend to focus their learning on technical legal knowledge, while paying less attention to the wider skills — ethics, judgement, client care, risk awareness — that are equally important to competent practice. Many practitioners do not build structured reflection on their own performance into their routine. And where concerns are noticed about the competence of colleagues, action is not always taken.

Professional ethics sits at the heart of the SRA’s thinking. Ethical failures, the consultation notes, can have profound consequences not only for clients but for public confidence in the profession, the administration of justice, and the rule of law. The SRA wants ethical decision-making to become a regular, visible part of how firms operate — not something revisited only when something has gone wrong.

What is being proposed

The consultation sets out three headline changes. Each would mean real, practical adjustments for firms.

1. Recording learning and development needs. Solicitors would be required to record the learning and development needs they have identified and how they have addressed them. This formalises what is already expected under the current reflective approach, but turns it into something concrete, evidenced and auditable.
2. Mandatory annual ethics discussions. Every solicitor would have to participate, at least once a year, in a structured ethics discussion. These would be peer-led conversations about real ethical dilemmas encountered in practice — designed to encourage shared reflection and move ethics out of the textbook and into the everyday work of the firm.
3. A new power to mandate specific training, much as is currently required on the topic of money laundering where some element of training is a requirement of the MLR 2017 . The SRA is proposing a rule that would allow it to require some or all solicitors within a firm to complete other areas of specific learning and development where a competence concern has been identified. This would be  a significant extension to the regulator’s toolkit.

In addition, the SRA is considering a rule that would let it require non-authorised staff within an SRA-regulated firm to complete training. In other words, the regime could reach beyond solicitors to encompass paralegals, administrators and support staff where appropriate.

What this means in practice for firms

The direction of travel is clear. The SRA is moving from a largely self-directed model towards one that is structured, evidenced, and demonstrably embedded in the life of the firm. For COLPs, COFAs, managing partners and HR leads, this raises some immediate questions:

• Can you evidence, for every fee earner, what their learning needs are and how they have been addressed this year?
• Do you run regular, meaningful ethics discussions — and can you show who attended and what was covered?
• Is your training record centralised, up to date, and ready to produce at short notice if the SRA asks?
• Does your approach reach all relevant staff, not just qualified solicitors?

Firms that rely on ad hoc CPD logs, disconnected spreadsheets, or the assumption that people will sort their own training out, are likely to find themselves exposed under the new regime.

Preparing now, not later

The consultation does not close until 15 July 2026, and any resulting rule changes will need Legal Services Board approval before taking effect. But this is not a moment to wait and see. The underlying expectations — reflective, risk-based, evidenced learning — are already live, and the SRA’s inspections increasingly reflect that.

Sensible first steps include:

• Mapping current training provision against the SRA’s competence statement and the specific risk areas your firm faces — AML, client money, data protection, conflicts, client care, equality and diversity, and AI and technology risk.
• Centralising training records so that assignments, completions, assessments and certificates live in one place rather than scattered across inboxes and shared drives.
• Building structured ethics conversations into the firm’s rhythm — whether as standalone sessions, departmental meetings, or part of supervision — and documenting them.
• Differentiating training by role, so that partners, junior fee earners, paralegals and support staff are getting content that is genuinely relevant to their work and their risk profile.

How Infolegal can help

This is precisely the territory the Infolegal InfoHub is built for. Its training library is written specifically for SRA-regulated firms and covers the areas the regulator is most focused on — professional ethics, conflicts and confidentiality, AML and financial crime, the SRA Accounts Rules, client care, data protection and cybersecurity, equality and diversity, and emerging risks such as AI.

Just as importantly, the Training Hub is designed with compliance oversight in mind. Courses can be assigned by role, department or risk profile. Completion, quiz results and certificates are captured centrally and are fully exportable for SRA inspections, Lexcel or CQS reviews, COLP and COFA annual reports, and regulatory enquiries. Automated reminders cut down on manual chasing, and non-Infolegal training — external events, webinars, internal briefings — can be logged alongside so the firm has a single, defensible training record.

Where off-the-shelf content is not enough, bespoke courses can be built around the firm’s own policies, procedures and risk register, creating a clear evidential link between identified risks and targeted mitigation.

In short, it moves firms from reactive, ad hoc training towards the planned, evidenced, role-appropriate approach the SRA is signalling it expects.

The bottom line

The SRA’s consultation is not revolutionary — but it is a clear signal that the regulator wants competence to be managed, not assumed. Firms that already treat training as an active compliance function will find the proposed changes relatively straightforward to absorb. Those that do not will need to rethink how they plan, deliver and evidence learning across the firm.

Either way, the direction is settled: training is moving from administrative afterthought to a core part of good risk governance. The firms that get ahead of that shift now will be the ones best placed when the new rules take effect.