Collins Rice: No errors in SDT ruling
A solicitor described by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) as having acted in a seriously inept manner has failed in his appeal against an £8,000 fine to the High Court.
Mrs Justice Collins Rice said that Naim Lone felt strongly that he had been “shabbily treated, if not victimised, by the regulatory proceedings that were brought against him”.
However, she did not find that the SDT had been wrong in law, made unsupported findings, “or made discretionary and evaluative decisions that were off the scale of choices properly available to it”.
She continued: “That conclusion is consistent with the possibility that it could also, properly, have decided at least some of these matters differently. But I cannot find that it had to.”
Mr Lone, who qualified in 1996, ran South London Attiyah Lone & Associates, which closed in December 2016 after he failed to obtain indemnity insurance. He set up a new firm, AL Law & Associates, but it had no client account.
He had acted for ‘Client C’ in relation to his divorce. Under the financial settlement, Client C was to receive £134,200 less costs, to be generated by the sale of the family home and a property in France.
A dispute arose between Mr Lone and Client C over his fees and November 2016, the Central Family Court ordered that £29,000 – which was what Client C thought the fees should be – be paid into Attiyah Lone’s office account, with around £100,000 of the proceeds of the two sales to be transferred to the firm’s client account pending a further court order or agreement between the parties on the fees dispute.
By the time this happened, however, Mr Lone was operating from his new firm without a client account. He arranged for the money to be transferred instead to Firm B’s client account.
This was in breach of the court order; the solicitor should either have sought a variation of the order or reached agreement with Client C, the SDT said.
The SDT found that Mr Lone “believed that he was attempting to comply with the order” but had been “inept in his handling of the situation and seriously so” and “effectively” using Firm B as a banking facility.
But though he had “demonstrated a significant level of incompetence” and breached several SRA principles, the tribunal decided the solicitor had not lacked integrity.
The SDT also found that Mr Lone allowed ‘Person B’, the owner of Firm B, to continue working on a file he had transferred to Mr Lone ahead of his firm being shut down by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Person B had been suspended and was later struck off.
Collins Rice J said Mr Lone believed he had acted with integrity “and worked hard and imaginatively to get the best results for his clients in difficult situations”.
“He feels that not only did they come to no practical harm as a result of his actions, he helped them with solutions that saved them from worse outcomes. He does not recognise the labels of impropriety and misconduct attached to what he did.
“He is particularly offended by the assessment of seriousness which landed him with a non-trivial fine. And he is even more offended to have been landed with an ‘eye watering’ costs bill [of £29,400] which makes him pay for the very procedure to which he takes such exception.”
But the judge rejected the multiple challenges Mr Lone made to the SDT ruling. Under the court order, he could have sought Client C’s written consent to an alternative arrangement but did not.
“Instead, Mr Lone adopted a course of action which amounted, from an objective viewpoint, to maximising his own prospects of accessing the money and any proper interest he was found to have in it, while exposing Client C to a risk – which, as it turned out, was not fanciful or negligible – outside the purview of the court’s supervisory controls and the balance the court had struck.”
Collins Rice J said there was “no compelling reason” to believe the SDT had ignored Mr Lone’s evidence and submissions.
“The tribunal throughout acknowledged Mr Lone’s good faith and good intentions. It acknowledged that in the end no client had lost money. It noted his unblemished record and had no reservations about his future practice. These are all important outcomes for him.
“But it did identify three specific points of professional misjudgement which it assessed relatively (but not ‘very’) seriously because they involved breach of a court order and a degree of inattentiveness to the inherent problems of conflict of interest – both of which go to the fundamentals of the legal profession and to the public’s confidence in it.
“In each case he was found to have substituted his own solution to the management of risk for that which was, for good reason, professionally indicated.”
The judge found no error either in how the SDT reached its decision on sanction or costs.
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