Law firms operating under the SRA Code of Conduct for Firms 2019, MLR 2017, and GDPR face a structural deficit: compliance processes exist in documents, spreadsheets, and email threads — not in auditable, retrievable infrastructure. When the SRA investigates, evidence retrieval takes days. When fines land, there is no immutable record to contest them.
Fee earner supervision shall be documented with a distinct supervisor per matter. Most firms track this in spreadsheets or email — neither constitutes an immutable, timestamped audit trail. When the SRA requests supervision records, firms cannot produce them within acceptable timeframes, triggering further investigation.
Under MLR 2017 Regulation 28, AML checks shall be completed before a matter proceeds. Without automated closure gating, matters advance to billing without a completed AML checklist. This constitutes a regulatory breach — but most firms discover it only during a post-hoc audit.
Matter compliance checklists exist as PDF templates or printed forms. There is no structural mechanism to enforce completion, no alerting when items are overdue, and no aggregated view of compliance status across the firm's active matter portfolio.
Legal precedent documents are stored in shared drives without version integrity, approval workflows, or regulatory traceability. Fee earners use superseded precedents without awareness. There is no audit trail confirming which version was used on which matter.
COLPs and MLROs lack aggregated, real-time data on firm-wide compliance status. Readiness reports are produced manually, consuming significant partner time, and reflect historical data rather than the firm's current regulatory posture at the moment of inspection.
Compliance governance in most firms relies on staff adherence to policy documents. Business rules are not enforced at the data layer. A fee earner can bypass a supervision assignment or skip a checklist item — and the firm has no structural control preventing it.
When compliance infrastructure fails, the consequences are not hypothetical. SRA regulatory actions carry financial penalties, practice restrictions, and reputational damage disproportionate to the underlying compliance deficit.
The deeper problem is structural: firms invest in policies they cannot prove are followed. A COLP signing off on the annual firm compliance statement is asserting compliance on the basis of trust, not evidence. That assertion does not withstand regulatory scrutiny.
Under ISO 9001:2015 Clause 9.1, organisations shall monitor, measure, analyse, and evaluate their quality management processes. Manual compliance practices — spreadsheets, shared drives, paper forms — satisfy none of these requirements at a structural level.
UNUS London builds compliance systems where business rules — supervision assignments, AML closure gates, checklist enforcement, document versioning — are enforced at the PostgreSQL schema level. Compliance is not a policy your staff shall follow; it is a constraint the database enforces. Evidence is not retrieved; it is always available.
Every supervision event, checklist completion, precedent approval, and matter state change is recorded with a timestamped, immutable audit entry. Sub-30-second evidence retrieval replaces multi-day manual searches. Your COLP no longer asserts compliance — they produce structured evidence of it.
Self-supervision is blocked by a database constraint — a fee earner cannot be assigned as their own supervisor, satisfying SRA Code §7.1 structurally. AML closure gates prevent matter progression without completed checks. No policy document achieves this level of enforcement integrity.
Automated weekly SRA Regulatory Readiness Reports aggregate supervision coverage, AML compliance rates, checklist completions, and matter risk scores. Your COLP receives structured, data-driven evidence of firm-wide compliance posture — delivered automatically, without manual preparation.
Each mini solution is independently deployable and production-ready. All systems share the UNUS London database-first architecture and feed directly into the SRA Regulatory Readiness Report.
Structured compliance checklist engine for active matters. Enforces AML completion before closure. Provides per-matter and firm-wide compliance visibility with automated alerting on overdue items.
View SolutionStructured approval workflow for legal precedents. Enforces partner sign-off before a document may be used on matters. Creates an immutable approval audit trail with version tracking and regulatory traceability.
View SolutionVersioned, searchable precedent document register with ISO 9001-aligned document control. Ensures fee earners access only approved, current precedents. Eliminates superseded document risk.
View SolutionPrimary supervision infrastructure for SRA-regulated firms. Tracks fee earners, supervisors, matters, and supervision events with database-enforced §7.1 compliance. Self-supervision structurally blocked. Sub-30-second evidence retrieval.
View SolutionAutomated weekly SRA Regulatory Readiness Reports for COLPs and MLROs. Aggregates supervision coverage, AML compliance rates, checklist completions, and matter risk scores into a structured, evidence-grade readiness assessment.
View SolutionDeploying a compliance system is one thing. Keeping it evidence-grade through a supervision cycle, a file review, and the next regulatory change is another. UNUS Govern is the operational wrapper that turns a one-time build into a continuously-evidenced system. For legal practices, the relevant Govern add-on module provides SRA-specific continuous-evidence tracking, COLP / MLRO gate monitoring, and an always-current readiness score the SRA expects to see.
Book a 30-minute discovery call. We will assess your compliance posture against SRA Code requirements, identify your highest-risk gaps, and specify the production-ready systems that address them — deployed in 14 days.