Regulatory & Professional Discipline

7BR’s Regulatory and Professional Discipline barristers undertake a wide range of work across the field, at the highest level.

Professional Discipline

7BR members represent a variety of clients in professional disciplinary actions, combining multi-disciplinary skills to ensure first class advocacy, sounds judgment and careful client support.

7BR clients in this area may be facing or pursuing allegations including dishonesty, sexually inappropriate behaviour or managerial negligence. Cases can run in tandem with internal investigations or employment tribunals, emerging from grievances and other allegations made under employment law. Moreover, many of the allegations our clients face pertain to the death of service users, touching on criminal allegations, inquests and clinical negligence. In this context, 7BR members are also able to identify and advise on a variety of potentially related civil actions.

7BR’s clients in this area work in industries including health and social work, policing, the military, legal practice, energy extraction and generation, engineering and transport, sports, education and financial services (see below). As such, members have experience of the procedures used by a very wide range of disciplinary bodies, ranging from the General Medical Council and the College of Policing, to the Institute & Faculty of Actuaries and the Bar Standards Board.

In the healthcare area, members appear before all the major tribunals including the General Medical Council (GMC), the General Dental Council (GDC), the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), the Housing and Property Chamber (HPC), the Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA), the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) and the First Tier (Care Standards) Tribunal. Members also have significant experience of police disciplinary tribunals, particularly in cases where equality and/or disability issues arise.

Financial Services

7BR members are instructed by both regulators and also by leading solicitors on behalf of firms and individuals in connection with FCA enforcement investigations and enquiries. Members are currently instructed in many of the high profile regulatory issues relating to LIBOR manipulation, interest rates swaps mis-selling, breaches of the Listing Rules, breaches of the regulatory perimeter, and market abuse. Members also advise on applications for FCA approval, regulatory gateway issues, skilled person reviews and supervisory interventions through the OIVOP procedure.

Members act in proceedings before the FRC, and the disciplinary committees of the ICAEW, ACCA, and CIPFA (for whom a member prosecuted a number of cases arising out of the collapse of the Icelandic banks).

Many instructions in this practice group are highly confidential and are never reported.