Duties to Court and Third Parties

Start with the SRA Principles, because they are not a flat list — they are ranked, and the ranking does all the work.

SRA Principle 1 requires a solicitor to act in a way that upholds the constitutional principle of the rule of law and the proper administration of justice. SRA Principle 2 requires upholding public trust and confidence in the profession. Both sit above the principle requiring solicitors to act in their clients' best interests. That is not accidental drafting — it is the load-bearing rule of the whole topic.

Where the Principles conflict, the principle safeguarding the wider public interest beats a principle protecting only an individual client's interest. A solicitor's duty to act in a client's best interests never overrides the duty to uphold the proper administration of justice. Where client duty and court duty collide, the court duty wins.

This is why a solicitor's overriding duty to the court can require acting against a client's explicit instructions. Imagine a client insists you tell the judge a witness statement was served on time when it wasn't. Your instructions say "cover for me." Principle 1 says you cannot. The instructions lose.

Paragraph 1.4 of the SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors prohibits misleading or attempting to mislead clients, the court, or others. Read that as three separate promises rolled into one paragraph — a promise to your own client, a promise to the tribunal, and a promise to everyone else you deal with professionally.

The court-facing promise is the one SQE1 tests hardest, and its trap is subtlety: the duty is not limited to statements you personally make. It extends to being complicit in a client's acts or omissions that mislead the court. If your client tells the judge something false and you sit there saying nothing while knowing it's false, you have not stayed neutral — you have breached paragraph 1.4 by omission. A solicitor breaches the duty to the court if they knowingly or recklessly allow the court to be misled, even without personally uttering the misleading statement. "Recklessly" is doing real work in that sentence: willful blindness is not a defense.

The practical consequence is that a solicitor must not allow a client to knowingly mislead the court in order to advance the client's case — full stop, no matter how much that costs the client's position. If a client will not correct the record, the solicitor typically cannot continue to act, because continuing to act while staying silent is itself the breach.

Paragraph 1.2 shifts the lens from the court to the person across the table. It prohibits abusing a position of trust by taking unfair advantage of clients or third parties, and the scenario SQE1 loves is the unrepresented opponent — someone negotiating a dispute or a conveyance without a solicitor of their own.

A trained solicitor negotiating against a layperson has a structural power advantage merely by knowing the rules of the game. The Code doesn't ask you to hand that advantage away, but it does draw two hard lines:

• Artificial urgency. Setting an artificially short deadline for an unrepresented opponent to respond to correspondence can amount to taking unfair advantage under paragraph 1.2. So can setting a deadline that is wholly unnecessary — manufacturing time pressure where none exists in order to force a bad decision.
• False neutrality. A solicitor dealing with an unrepresented party must not create a false impression that they are acting impartially between that party and the solicitor's own client. You may be scrupulously polite and even helpful in explaining process — but the moment the other side starts to believe you are looking out for their interests too, you have crossed into misconduct, because you are not, and cannot be.

The unifying test across both rules: would a reasonable person think you engineered the situation to exploit someone else's lack of legal knowledge? If yes, paragraph 1.2 is in play.

Move from "don't mislead the tribunal" to "don't corrupt the raw material the tribunal relies on." Three consecutive paragraphs build a fence around evidence:

Paragraph 2.1 prohibits misusing or tampering with evidence, or attempting to do so. Paragraph 2.2 prohibits seeking to influence the substance of evidence — with generating false evidence and persuading a witness to change their evidence given as the paradigm examples. Paragraph 2.3 prohibits offering a witness any benefit dependent on either the nature of their evidence or the outcome of the case.

Notice the precision of paragraph 2.3: it does not ban paying a witness expenses, or even a reasonable fee for genuinely lost time — it bans conditioning any benefit on what the witness says or on who wins. Pay a witness £500 regardless of their testimony and you may be within the rules; promise them £500 if the case goes your client's way, and you have manufactured a financial incentive to lie. The line is between compensating someone for cooperating with the process and buying a particular outcome.

The final cluster governs how a solicitor behaves once inside the courtroom or in submissions to it.

Source: Uk-crown-court-order by UK Crown Court Judge Griffith, OGL 3.

Paragraph 2.7 is the one candidates find counterintuitive, so sit with it. It requires disclosing adverse authority — case law or statute that damages your own client's argument — and the duty to do so applies even where it disadvantages your own client. This feels like betrayal until you remember the hierarchy from earlier: the court cannot properly administer justice if it is only shown the law that helps one side. A solicitor who hides a fatal Court of Appeal authority isn't being a zealous advocate; they're sabotaging the mechanism that makes advocacy meaningful in the first place.

Source: Old Banks, Lower Thames St. Oamaru - panoramio by jokertrekker, CC BY 3.0.

Confidentiality agreements are ordinary, lawful commercial tools — the SRA's warning notice on non-disclosure agreements explicitly recognises that NDAs have a legitimate role in protecting genuine commercial interests, reputation, and confidentiality. The warning notice exists because that legitimate tool was being misused to bury allegations of serious misconduct, and it was published in response to a specific, documented failure: the SRA first issued the notice on 12 March 2018, following evidence given to the Women and Equalities Select Committee about settlement agreements interfering with the reporting of alleged crimes. The notice addresses precisely that risk — NDAs being used to suppress reporting of workplace misconduct.

The line the SRA draws is functional, not formal: an NDA is used improperly if it does any of the following, regardless of how the clause is worded.

An NDA is improper if it:

• prevents, impedes, or deters someone from reporting misconduct to the SRA;
• prevents a protected disclosure under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 (whistleblowing);
• prevents someone from cooperating with a criminal investigation; or
• prevents someone from disclosing matters to a professional adviser who is themselves bound by a duty of confidentiality (a solicitor, accountant, or doctor, for example).

The recurring pattern across all four: an NDA cannot be used to seal off channels that exist precisely to catch wrongdoing — the regulator, the whistleblowing statute, the police, or a confidential adviser. A clause silencing gossip at the pub is one thing; a clause silencing a report to the SRA is professional misconduct on the drafting solicitor's part, not just the client's.

This produces a genuinely hard professional moment. If a client instructs a solicitor to draft or enforce an NDA in a way that is inconsistent with these obligations, the solicitor must consider whether they can continue to act for that client at all — because a solicitor's duty to act in the client's best interests does not override the professional obligation to uphold the proper administration of justice. The client who insists on an unlawful gagging clause is asking the solicitor to choose between the retainer and the practising certificate, and the Code has already answered which one wins.

If NDAs are the quiet way to suppress scrutiny, SLAPPs — Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation — are the loud way. A SLAPP is a claim, or threatened claim, that is unmeritorious or pursued using abusive litigation tactics, typically deployed to stifle lawful scrutiny or publication of matters such as corruption or wrongdoing. The target is rarely a genuine legal wrong; it is a journalist, campaigner, or whistleblower whose reporting is inconvenient, and the "claim" is the cost and fear of litigation itself.

The SRA first published its warning notice on SLAPPs on 28 November 2022, and it identifies concrete red flags of abusive litigation conduct:

• bringing or threatening a claim without proper legal or factual foundation;
• using unduly aggressive or disproportionate correspondence against an opponent; and
• pursuing litigation for a purpose unconnected to genuinely resolving a dispute — for instance, deterring publication rather than vindicating a real legal right.

Solicitors are expected to be able to spot these tactics for what they are and to decline to act in that way, regardless of how instructed. Parliament has since given the concept statutory teeth in a specific context: the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 provides a statutory definition of the characteristics of a SLAPP, in the context of economic crime, enabling such claims to be identified and struck out through dedicated procedural rules.

Notice the structural symmetry with paragraph 2.4 above (submissions must be "properly arguable"). A SLAPP is, at bottom, litigation conduct that fails that same test at scale — an entire claim built on a foundation the solicitor knows, or should know, cannot support it.

The final piece ties NDAs and SLAPPs back to the profession's own oversight mechanism. A solicitor must not attempt to prevent any person from providing information to the SRA, or to another body exercising a regulatory or supervisory function in the public interest. Nor may a solicitor subject a person to detrimental treatment for making — or proposing to make — a report based on a reasonably held belief of misconduct.

This is the rule that makes the NDA warning notice and the SLAPPs warning notice cohere as a single idea rather than two unrelated topics. Both instruments — a gagging clause in a settlement agreement, a threatened claim against a critic — are attempts to interpose the solicitor's professional skill between wrongdoing and the bodies designed to catch it. The Code closes that loophole from both directions: directly, by banning solicitors from obstructing reports to the SRA or other regulators, and indirectly, by banning the two most common tools (NDAs, SLAPPs) used to achieve the same silencing effect informally.

Every rule in this topic is an application of one hierarchy: rule of law and administration of justice > public trust in the profession > the individual client's interest. A solicitor's independence and integrity, alongside the duty to the court, are the primary safeguards that let a solicitor navigate the inevitable tension between what a client wants, what a third party is owed, and what the public interest requires. On the SQE1, when a scenario question puts a client's instructions in direct conflict with the court, an unrepresented opponent, a witness, or a regulator, the answer is almost never "follow the client" — it is "identify which duty sits higher in the hierarchy, and follow that one instead."