SDT: Solicitor should have asked for help
A newly qualified solicitor who lost her job for falsifying progress on a matter and then did not tell her new employer why she had moved on, has been struck off.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) said Jessica Kate Harris “could have asked for help if she was struggling to complete her work due to personal circumstances” but did not.
Ms Harris, who qualified in 2021, joined national firm Weightmans and had been asked to draft two witness statements on behalf of a client.
In May 2021, she told her supervisor that she had drafted the statements and they were awaiting signature. She also uploaded to the firm’s document management systems three emails that had been sent to the witnesses a month earlier.
However, Ms Harris had not finished the witness statements and had falsified the emails.
Weightmans sacked her and, on the same day, she applied for a position at London firm Capsticks.
Asked in the application for the reason she had left her previous role, Ms Harris answered: “Pushed into area of law that I do not wish to pursue.” She did not disclose the true reason for her departure from Weightmans in two subsequent interviews either, and was hired by Capsticks.
Whilst it was true that Weightmans was moving her into an area of law she was not interested in, the SDT said her failure to disclose the nature of her departure and the full reasons behind it as “equivalent to falsifying a CV”.
Ms Harris admitted her misconduct but wanted to explain the background to it. Her father had died shortly before her qualification and “her previous employer had not handled the situation particularly well”, telling her on the day of his funeral that she would not be offered a job on qualification.
She added that she had been working from home because of the pandemic at the time. She “could not explain or comprehend her conduct, but she believed that it had been the result of panic and naivety.”
Ms Harris added that she had not appreciated the seriousness of her actions and that she would be referred to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) as a result – had she known that, she said, she would not have applied for a new job.
The SDT said she had shown “symptoms of grief” at the time, and that her “other personal circumstances, including remote work during the Covid pandemic and her status as a newly qualified solicitor, were distressing and would have justified [her] explaining why she had not done the work. “However, the circumstances did not account for [her] initial untruthfulness about the requested work and the actions that [she] took after that.”
Ms Harris admitted that, with hindsight, her actions had been “embarrassing and shameful”, adding that she was “very happy working in her current role in the third sector”.
The SDT found her inexperience and personal circumstances to be minor mitigating factors. But she “could have and should have been honest about her omission in not obtaining the draft witness statements and could have asked for help if she was struggling to complete her work”.
Ms Harris confirmed too that Weightmans had been supportive during the pandemic and she did not suggest that she had faced any particular pressure at work.
Rather, she “could not explain why she had panicked and why she had not told the truth”.
Given the serious nature of the allegation of dishonesty, the SDT concluded that “the only appropriate and proportionate sanction was to strike” her off.
The SRA sought costs of £30,000 – Capsticks usually acts for the regulator at the tribunal but, because of its involvement in the case, the work was handled instead by Blake Morgan.
As Weightmans and Capsticks had provided all the documentation needed, and Ms Harris had admitted her misconduct from the start, the amount of costs that could be regarded as reasonably and properly incurred was “very low”, the SDT held, ordering Ms Harris to pay £5,000.
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