‘Panic and naivety’
A newly qualified (NQ) solicitor has been struck off after fabricating several emails to indicate progress on a case she was handling and later misleading another firm about the circumstances of her dismissal.
Jessica Kate Harris, who qualified in 2021, worked as an associate at national law firm Weightmans and tasked with helping draft two witness statements on behalf of a client.
Harris informed her supervisor that the statements had been drafted and were awaiting signatures. She also uploaded three emails to the firm’s document management system, claiming they had been sent to the witnesses a month earlier.
But a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) heard that the emails had been “falsified” and that the witness statements were, in fact, incomplete.
Weightmans sacked Harris and, on the same day, she applied for a new role at fellow national law firm Capsticks.
The SDT judgment explains that Harris cited being pushed into an area of law she was not interested in as her reason for changing firms, but she did not fully disclose the complete circumstances behind her departure. This, the tribunal said, “was equivalent to falsifying a CV”.
Harris admitted her actions but explained to the tribunal that her father had passed away shortly before she qualified, and claimed her previous employer had not managed the situation particularly well. She also raised that she had been working from home due to 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”.
When deciding on a sanction, the tribunal found that the falsified emails were an attempt to cover up her failure to complete the requested work and that she had been fully in control of her actions.
The tribunal also viewed her actions in applying for a new role at Capsticks, while failing to disclose her dismissal, as a continuation of her previous misconduct, even though it occurred over a relatively short period of time.
It considered that her inexperience was a mitigating factor, but there was nothing to suggest that she had not been properly supervised or been subjected to undue pressure.
In light of the serious misconduct, the SDT concluded that “the only appropriate and proportionate sanction was to strike” her from the roll.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) initially claimed £30,000 in costs, but the tribunal reduced this to £5,000, noting that Harris had admitted her misconduct from the outset and that both Weightmans and Capsticks had provided all the necessary documentation.
Capsticks is typically the SRA’s go-to law firm for handling allegations of misconduct against solicitors. However, since Capsticks was directly involved in this case, the SRA, on this occasion, instructed the law firm Blake Morgan.