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