The SRA has secured approval from the Legal Services Board for a rule change stopping the same person from holding both the Compliance Officer for Legal Practice (COLP) and Compliance Officer for Finance and Administration (COFA) roles at higher-risk firms.
Anyone with authority over significant management decisions will no longer be eligible for either role, a structure many conveyancing firms currently rely on with a managing partner covering both.
Which firms are affected
The split applies where a firm’s most recent accounting period showed turnover above £600,000, or client money holdings above £2,000,000.
Sole owner-manager firms get a partial exemption: those over the turnover threshold cannot hold either role, but those caught only by the client money threshold can keep the COLP title, just not COFA.
Given how much client money conveyancing transactions typically move, many firms will land inside one threshold or the other.
Why this matters
The change is being phased in from early 2027, and a new COLP or COFA needs SRA approval before taking up the role. Firms that leave the eligibility check until the rules commence risk being left without an approved compliance officer at short notice.
Mapping who currently holds each role against who controls the firm’s management decisions is worth doing now, well before guidance lands this autumn.
Reducing the load on whoever holds COFA
Whoever ends up as COFA still carries the day-to-day monitoring of client money. As firms scramble to separate these responsibilities and reassess who holds ultimate management control, compliance officers will need every operational advantage they can get.
Offloading the manual reconciliation burden ensures that your newly appointed COFA can focus entirely on strategic oversight and compliance governance rather than getting bogged down in day-to-day transaction tracking.
Third-party regulated infrastructure, such as Kord’s real-time reporting on client balances, can reduce that manual reconciliation workload, whatever a firm’s final governance structure looks like.
Explore how Kord reduces COFA workload
This article was submitted by Kord as part of an advertising agreement with Today’s Conveyancer. The views expressed in this article are those of the advertiser and not those of Today’s Conveyancer.
