SDT: Strike-off only appropriate sanction
A solicitor who admitted lying to his partners about reporting a possible claim to their professional indemnity insurers has been struck off.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) withdrew further allegations of dishonesty against Simon Kennett Gurr after he admitted this misconduct.
A statement of agreed facts and outcome, approved by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT), said Mr Gurr, who qualified in 1987, was a partner at regional firm Direction Home (Law) LLP (which traded as Direction Law) until he was expelled in October 2019 over this incident.
He was acting for the claimant in road traffic accident claim which settled in 2017 for £580,000 plus costs.
In November 2018, on the defendant’s application, the Senior Courts Costs Office issued an unless order requiring the claimant to file a request for detailed assessment hearing, failing which all of their costs would be disallowed.
This was done but the judge then directed that he would not list the case until the replies to the points of dispute were received, along with confirmation that defendant agreed to the time estimate – which it gave Mr Gurr in early January 2019.
In May 2019, the defendant wrote to Mr Gurr to say that, as the matter had not been listed, it considered the claimant in breach of the November order. Mr Gurr said the request had been made to the court in January and appended a copy of the letter that had purportedly been sent.
In July, the court agreed Direction Law was in breach and ordered it to repay a £250,000 payment on account of costs and pay the defendant’s costs of the application. The firm applied for relief from sanction, which was to be heard in November.
Before then, the firm’s managing partner and compliance officer for legal practice, Andrew Theoff, conducted a file review. This led to a meeting on 11 October at which Mr Gurr told Mr Theoff and another senior partner that he had already notified the matter to the firm’s insurer.
At a follow-up meeting on 15 October, Mr Gurr said he could not find the original email but that, upon discovering that his contact at the insurer had left, he had copied the text of the email to someone else there.
The statement said Mr Gurr “was asked in the meeting how he could copy text from an email that he could not locate. The respondent had no answer to this question”.
A subsequent search of the firm’s server only recovered an email he sent to the insurer on 14 October and Mr Gurr admitted to the SRA that he had lied to his colleagues about the earlier notification.
He was also accused of lying about the existence of the January letter to the court and signing an untrue witness statement in support of the application for relief from sanctions. Mr Gurr denied this.
The SRA withdrew these allegations given that Mr Gurr had agreed to be struck off on the basis of the other one.
In mitigation, Mr Gurr said that this was the first disciplinary action he had faced in a 32-year career. He had been “in a state of shock at the 15 October 2019 meeting and panicked when being confronted unexpectedly by his fellow partners”.
The SDT said that the “only appropriate and proportionate sanction” for this misconduct was to strike him off.
Mr Gurr, who has retired to South Africa, agreed to pay costs of £15,000.
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