Why this subject is worth double
Legal Services is one of the three subjects in FLK1 Session 1. But ethics is also examined pervasively: a conduct point can be the hinge of a question about a shareholders’ agreement, a conveyancing undertaking, an estate administration or a police station interview, in either paper and either session.
That makes it the most efficient revision on the specification. Every hour spent on conflicts or confidentiality is an hour that pays in four other subjects.
The Principles and the Codes
The SRA Principles — the fundamental obligations to the rule of law, the administration of justice, public trust, independence, honesty, integrity, equality and the best interests of each client — and the way they rank when they conflict: the wider public interest comes before the individual client’s.
Then the Codes of Conduct for individuals and for firms, and the difference between the two. Questions are usually framed as “what must the solicitor do?”, with options offering commercially attractive answers that the Principles do not permit.
Conflicts and confidentiality
- Own interest conflicts, where the solicitor’s interest and the client’s do not align — never permissible.
- Client conflicts, and the two narrow exceptions: a substantially common interest, or competing for the same objective, each with informed written consent and safeguards.
- Confidentiality, which survives the end of the retainer and after death, and the limited circumstances in which disclosure is permitted or required.
- Disclosure: the duty to pass on material information to a client, and what happens when it collides with confidentiality owed to another.
This cluster produces more questions than anything else in the subject, and the scenarios are engineered so that the commercially convenient answer is the wrong one.
Client care, costs and complaints
What a client must be told at the outset and kept informed about, including costs information and how it must be updated; the complaints procedure and the client’s right to go to the Legal Ombudsman; and the treatment of vulnerable clients and those with impaired capacity.
Adjacent to it sits the duty not to mislead the court or a third party, and the duty to the court that overrides the client’s instructions — examined hardest in the litigation and criminal subjects.
Who may do what: reserved activities
The reserved legal activities and who may carry them out, the consequences of doing so without authorisation, the role of the SRA and the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, and the regulatory architecture including alternative business structures and in-house practice. Also the rules on referrals, introductions and publicity.
Money laundering and financial crime
Examined in FLK1 rather than FLK2. The principal offences — concealing, arranging, acquiring, tipping off, and failure to disclose — customer due diligence and when enhanced measures are required, the role of the nominated officer, and suspicious activity reports and the consent regime.
Questions typically describe a transaction with an odd feature — an unexplained third-party payment, a client in a hurry, funds from an unexpected source — and ask what the solicitor must do next.
Where the marks go
- Acting for two clients. Candidates reach for consent as though it cures everything. It does not cure an own interest conflict.
- Tipping off. The instinct to warn the client is the offence.
- Duty to the court.In litigation and criminal questions, the client’s instructions do not win.
- Undertakings. Personal, binding and enforceable — examined most often in Property Practice.
Revise it early rather than last, because it compounds: the rest of FLK1 and FLK2 keep asking it.