SDT:
A law firm’s co-owner has been struck off for “appalling conduct” that involved violence, bullying and harassment aimed at junior colleagues.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) said Domenico (Dominic) Pisaro’s motivations for his actions were not clear, but it considered that, for the most part, they “had been part of his character”.
It said his co-director at North London firm Dominic Levent Solicitors, Levent Hasan, eventually told staff to work from home because his behaviour had made the office environment “unsafe and toxic”.
In addition, law students who were undertaking work experience at the firm were told by their university to leave at once after it learnt what had been happening.
Mr Pisaro, who qualified in 2001, was a director until April 2022. The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) had updated its guidance on workplace environments in February 2022 and by May had received four reports about his conduct.
He engaged with the SRA initially but not with the SDT hearing, having declined to undergo a medical assessment to understand a health condition he said impaired his involvement. The SDT proceeded in his absence.
It found proven nine specific instances of “offensive, intimidating and demeaning” conduct from September 2021 onwards, although the evidence recounted in the ruling indicated many more.
After a remote hearing with a divorce client, and in the client’s presence, he “put his face inappropriately close to the face” of a trainee solicitor and shouted at her over what had happened.
When speaking to the trainee and a paralegal on another occasion, he referred to a former employee as “gaylord” and “battyman”.
The witness statement from the paralegal recalled an earlier “jovial conversation” in the office regarding the phrase ‘men are trash’. Mr Pisaro was in the office at the time and “gradually inserted himself into the conversation defending men and stating, ‘if men are trash, you are dirty whores’”.
The paralegal said that, whilst she was “a little taken aback by this”, this was not unusual language for Mr Pisaro, “who would use such vulgar terms as ‘being raped’ or ‘fucked in the ass’ when speaking about a difficult case he was working on”.
Another paralegal, who described her relationship with Mr Pisaro as “awkward and uncomfortable” because he treated her more like a friend, recounted two instances when he was showing her pictures on his phone, one of which was of a vagina.
He told her that “girls send me lots of pictures on WhatsApp, I don’t ask for them, they just send them”. He “laughed before walking off”.
In a later incident, he told the same paralegal that “I can’t look at you, you look sexy” before covering his eyes. She said she stopped wearing dresses to work thereafter.
A work experience student reported being shouted at by Mr Pisaro from so close “that his saliva was projected onto his face”.
He said Mr Pisaro began kneeing the chair he was sitting on, which was being pushed into the wall. The partner then kicked a bag with such force that he went through it and kicked the student in the ankle.
A further incident saw him swear at a paralegal while criticising her work and slamming a chair against a storage door behind her.
There were two more findings relating to another trainee. On one occasion, Mr Pisano told him, in front of the office, that he should obey and listen to him and “follow the teaching of the Quran”.
The trainee said that, as a practising Muslim, he found these comments to be “very insulting and offensive”.
This had followed verbal abuse earlier that day and, as a result, Mr Hasan then instructed all staff to work from home and only come into the office when necessary. “This was to avoid any further incidents of staff being subjected to the respondent’s outbursts,” the SDT was told.
But in a telephone call, Mr Pisano told the trainee he was acting illegally and in breach of his contract by working from home “and threatened to end his career”.
The SDT found multiple rule breaches, including a lack of integrity. It said: “It should have been obvious to all solicitors, particularly an experienced solicitor in a position of a seniority and authority, that a solicitor that shouts at colleagues, uses unsuitable, insulting and/or homophobic language whilst in the office, shows colleagues pornographic pictures, physically assaults (whether recklessly or intentionally) a member of staff in the office and/or bullies, harasses and demeans colleagues whilst in the office, does not act with integrity.”
Mr Pisano’s conduct was “appalling and went materially beyond conduct that could be described as simply careless”.
There was a separate set of findings over a family case the firm was acting on, when Mr Pisaro sent an email to a barrister, copied to the firm’s accountants and the SRA’s professional ethics team, that accused Mr Hasan of “conducting complex family work without skill, training, supervision and negligently”.
He also accused Mr Hasan of “consciously concealing” that ‘Client A’ lacked mental capacity.
The SRA said that, in fact, Mr Hasan had no involvement in the matter, as the client was a relative of his and he wanted it handled in an impartial manner. There was medical evidence on file to confirm Client A had capacity.
The client requested that Mr Pisano have no further dealings with the matter after learning of the email but he later emailed the representative for the opposing side alleging that the client lacked capacity.
These statements to third parties were “malicious, insulting and degrading” and he must have known that they were untrue, the SDT said, while by contacting the opposing side, he had undermined her case.
He was separately found to have emailed Brentford County Court and others on another matter, alleging that the client had been “abandoned” by Mr Hasan and a colleague, that they were “not suitably qualified to conduct the matter”, that work on the file was being “sabotaged” and that the solicitors were in breach of the SRA’s code of conduct.
These “unsubstantiated, damaging and untrue statements” were “a malicious attempt to put stains” on his colleagues’ professional reputations, the tribunal concluded.
In striking him off, the SDT said that “critical” to its assessment of Mr Pisano’s culpability was the fact that his misconduct “involved violence, bullying and harassment that had caused both physical and emotional harm to the respondent’s junior colleagues and clients of the firm”.
He had “materially abused his position of seniority and authority” and had breached the SRA rules “in many respects”.
Mr Pisano was also ordered to pay costs of £42,000.
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