THE COMPLIANCE PARTNER
We first met
Vanessa Shenton some 3 years ago when she was then employed by the Law Society
Monitoring Unit. We are the subject of many compliance audits but we
found the audit with Vanessa extremely helpful, with Vanessa focusing very much
on practical help to us.
We subsequently
discovered that Vanessa had set up in business providing compliance help to law
firms and had been discussing how we could work together. I thought that
Vanessa’s new business was an interesting idea and had tremendous potential,
particularly with small firms who may struggle to cope with the riggers that
compliance brings.
In August 2007,
we engaged Vanessa to conduct an internal departmental audit to satisfy quality
assurance standards. We found that Vanessa was able to pick up on
compliance issues and provide us with some precedents to help re-draft standard
documentation.
Vanessa has
also been very helpful in providing advice to our Complaints Partner in
relation to a number of complaints and in particular, the stance that should be
taken to resolve them.
Paul Lowe, Executive Director, Darbys Solicitors
LLP (Vanessa has just
entered her third full year- 2010- under a retainer arrangement with Darbys)
The Compliance
Partner has given great assistance to my firm in advising us and drafting our
policy to comply with the Money Laundering and related regulations. The
policy has been drafted to suit our own particular requirements, having regard
to the nature of the legal work undertaken by us. We received fairly short
notice of a supervisory visit by the Solicitors Regulation Authority and
Vanessa has been most helpful in drafting our policy in good time for that
visit.
Nick Parr, Pinto Potts LLP
We
recently asked Vanessa to provide us with a 2 hour bespoke Anti Money
Laundering training session, firstly for our MLROs and then a slightly shorter
session, which we are rolling out to all staff. Vanessa worked closely with us
to ensure that the course content was audience-relevant and made appropriate
references to Pitmans' existing and proposed AML policies. The
training was on target and delegate feedback has been entirely positive.
Jo Riddick, Risk and Compliance Partner, Pitmans
Solicitors
Amongst the
course material were two flowcharts which were produced by Mrs Shenton, the
first dealing with conflicts of interests and the second
with confidentiality under Rule 4. These flow charts were a very useful
aid in visualising the issues and were suitable for application in
the various scenarios where such conflicts or confidentiality issues may
arise.
Having attended
the course it was my role in my department at work to go through the
issues and I feel that these flowcharts have been extremely useful to assist
with this.
Jo Ellis, AMD Solicitors
Vanessa told us
that she had set up in business as The Compliance Partner. We had no
hesitation in using her services…The assignment [carried out by Vanessa] is an
analysis of our profitability and how we might improve our competitive position
in the future and how we might improve our market value to potential investors
when the Legal Services Bill allows for this. It is a very useful study.
We have some
ideas about how to grow our business and we intend to engage Vanessa to help us
consider the compliance issues of these opportunities.
B.S.Bains, Partner, Lawrence Hamblin Solicitors
Vanessa and I
have worked together on a number of projects. Vanessa also assisted me by
reviewing the draft client care letter which appears in the fourth edition of
the Lexcel Practice Excellence Kit.
Vanessa is well
placed to provide advice to firms on compliance and regulation issues and I
think that firms will benefit from the plans she has in this regard.
Matthew Moore, Web4Law Ltd and the Law Society’s
trainer on Lexcel
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