“Disruptive” solicitor ordered to pay SRA costs of £20,000

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Tribunal: Case was exceptional enough to justify costs

A solicitor has been ordered to pay the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) £20,000 in costs for his “unreasonable and indeed vexatious and disruptive conduct” of litigation against it.

Adekunle Soyege was repeatedly warned by employment judges about how he was pursuing his case against the SRA, with complaints about the volume of, and language in, emails he was sending the regulator and its lawyers.

Mr Soyege issued three claims of discrimination, harassment and victimisation in 2020 and 2021 over the SRA placing conditions on his practising certificate.

He had operated as a sole practitioner, trading as Nat Jen Soyege in Milton Keynes, and was rebuked in 2016 for having practised without professional indemnity insurance for just over a month before closing his firm in February 2015.

Some of the allegations were struck out in advance of the six-day hearing in March 2023 – as Mr Soyege was not an employee of the SRA – and most of the rest were dismissed because the tribunal had no jurisdiction to hear them. The remainder were not well founded.

Further claims issued in 2022 and 2024 have separately been struck out. The SRA sent him a clear costs warning letter in January 2022.

The SRA sought costs of £20,000 – the most an employment tribunal can award without a detailed assessment – even though its costs at the time of the ruling were nearly five times that amount.

Employment Judge Flood, sitting in Birmingham, said that since the judgment was issued in June 2023, the tribunal had received “a significant amount of email correspondence from the claimant. Many of the emails were confused and incoherent at times”.

Emails Mr Soyege sent in January 2025 appeared to accuse the SRA’s lawyer “of accessing his email account and retrieving and changing documents to pretend they were from the claimant”.

Judge Flood held that the claims were “baseless from the outset, and doomed to fail”.

Mr Soyege “knew or objectively should have known that the complaints had no reasonable prospects from the outset, particularly as although a litigant in person he is also a qualified solicitor”.

Though not all his claims were struck out, the tribunal noted that this was a relatively rare step in discrimination claims.

Mr Soyege’s allegations were “no more than bare assertions with nothing to support them”, plus he had “clear documentary evidence explaining why decisions were made but still persisted again and again in saying that discrimination was the motive”.

His complaints “never had any reasonable prospect of succeeding”, Judge Flood said.

Despite clear warnings and express findings from different judges at preliminary hearings, he “persists with his practice of sending very many lengthy and difficult to follow emails with numerous irrelevant attachments to the [SRA], the tribunal and it appears the Employment Appeal Tribunal”.

He also continued to make “very serious unfounded allegations of misconduct” against the SRA and its legal representatives, again despite being warned against doing so.

“We agree with the submissions of the [SRA] that it is hard to think of a case so clear cut where the conduct has been so poor.”

Mr Soyege was “an intelligent and educated man who must have had some insight into the very significant challenges with the validity of his own claims”, the tribunal said.

The effect of his “unreasonable and indeed vexatious and disruptive conduct is abundantly clear” from the regulator’s schedule of costs.

“The sums the respondent had to spend on legal costs on dealing with one claimant are high, but we do not consider the amounts spent were excessive given the number of complaints and nature of allegations made and the way in which the claimant was conducting litigation.

“We conclude that the manner in which the claimant brought and pursued his claims has led to costs being incurred which amount to a sum way in excess of the £20,000 claimed for in this costs application.

“Many thousands of pounds of costs were incurred solely as a result of the claimant’s unreasonable and vexatious conduct.”

Though costs in the employment tribunal were the exception rather than the rule, this was an exceptional case, Judge Flood added.