Junior associate refused
A senior partner has been suspended for nine months after telling a newly qualified (NQ) to send a misleading email to a client.
Rajpal Panesar, at the time managing partner in the property department of national law firm Taylor Rose, was supervising Person A when he made the request.
Person A, an NQ solicitor who had been admitted to the roll only three weeks prior to the incident, refused and reported Panesar to the firm’s compliance officer and the regulator.
Pansear avoided being struck off for dishonesty due to “exceptional circumstances,” the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal said, noting that the email in question was never sent.
The events date back to 2021, where the experienced solicitor told a client that a report would be sent to them that day, Friday 19 March. Pansear then told Person A to photocopy and post the relevant documents.
On the following Monday, Pansear confirmed to the client that this had been done, before later seeking confirmation from Person A on Tuesday 23 March, who told him that the report had not yet been sent.
In “a moment of madness”, Pansear rejected the NQ solicitor’s suggestion to send the documents by courier on Tuesday, stating in an email that the client would “know that I was misleading her” because he had already confirmed that the documents had been sent.
Person A drafted an email to the client, explaining that the report had not been sent earlier due to limited staff in the office because of Covid restrictions. However, Pansear subsequently prepared a revised email stating that the documents had already been sent, were returned to the firm for unknown reasons, and would be sent again. He explained that he did this to avoid being “shouted at” by the client.
But the NQ solicitor refused to send the revised email, telling Pansear that she didn’t “feel comfortable explaining the situation this way”. The experienced partner and the junior solicitor then spoke on the phone about the issue.
Person A told the tribunal that she could not recall the detail of the conversation other than Panesar had “persistently” asked her to send the email that he had amended. She said that there was no outcome or agreement following the conversation and that the conversation did not lead anywhere.
Panesar’s recollection of the telephone call differed, stating that Person A had persuaded him he “should not put his anxiety before his regulatory responsibilities”. By the end of the call, Panesar agreed that Person A was correct and that the misleading email should not be sent, he said.
A witness to the call said that Person A was left in tears.
Ultimately the original email was sent by Person A, with the tribunal noting that “the fact that the report was sent on 23 March 2021 rather than on 19 March 2021 had no impact on the client nor on the transaction which completed successfully”.
During the disciplinary proceedings it was noted that the events had had a “devastating impact” on Person A. She described the incident as “heavily impacting upon her mental-health and well-being”. She asked immediately to be moved to a different office within the firm, stated that she required support for her mental health and had “considered carefully whether she had a future in the legal profession for fear of a similar incident happening in future”.
In deciding that a suspension, rather than a strike off, was sufficient, the tribunal considered the “exceptional circumstances” of the case. It concluded that the dishonesty, which lasted for only 90 minutes, was not premeditated, did not continue since the offending email was not actually sent to the client, and did not prejudice the underlying transaction. These factors were sufficient to reduce the sanction to a suspension.
It also took into account Pansear’s remorse and admission of wrongdoing at an early stage.
Along with being suspended for nine months, Pansear was ordered to pay costs of £14,000.
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