The LSAG guidance is an invaluable aid to those in the legal sector, and has been written in light of changes to the Regulations. In this week’s compliance for law firms session, with Steve Brett and Kate Burt, we had an interesting workshop, exploring the key area’s of the LSAG guidance.
This first session, you could say was an introduction to a series of workshops on LSAG guidance, where, some priority areas were short-listed to focus on, in future sessions.
In the workshop, participants were put into groups in breakout rooms ( on zoom), to discuss the high level principles and what is priority for them and their firms. Each group were given 15 minutes for discussion and then were brought back together to discuss and share thoughts as a whole group.
During the session it was found that, more clarification on some of the changes were needed. The focus appeared to be on the length of the guidance, as it is very long and over 200 pages! And how firms would need to implement these regulations and make staff fully aware as to what is involved and mostly, learning about the implications of not putting the new changes into practice.
Some key principles discussed were about Verification,Source of Funds, Source of Wealth and Practice Wide Risk Assessment. Some participants felt these were key to understand on a practical level and the importance of educating clients. Therefore relaying the key messages firm wide in layman’s terms would be a good starting point.
For a full read of the LSAG Guidance, please click on the following link – Legal Sector Affinity Group anti-money laundering guidance for the legal sector (PDF 3.1 MB)
If you would like to learn more about our training or would like to be part of these sessions please contact us, hello@e3ct.com
