Partner receives £32,000 fine secretly working on a deal with his firm on the opposite side

An experienced partner who secretly worked on the purchase of a property where his firm was acting for the seller has been fined £32,000 for a lack of integrity.

1 DON’T BUY DRUGS FROM YOUR CLIENT!

This is definitely not advice we ever expected to be putting in here! However, a barrister has recently pleaded guilty to obtaining drugs from his client. The really tragic part of this case is that the drugs he purchased led to the death of his partner.

2 DON’T GAMBLE USING CLIENT COMPENSATION

Stating the obvious part 2! This time a trainee solicitor who stole more than £100,000 of client compensation to fund a gambling habit has been jailed for two years. Over a 12-month period, he duped various insurance companies out of up to £8,000 a time by giving them his own personal NatWest bank account details instead of those of the firm. In all, he directed £100,437 to his account, claiming to have spent all of the money on gambling. The firm’s partners had to pay out £400,000 to cover losses and a third of its 24 staff were made redundant.

3 DON’T DRINK & DRIVE

And finally, stating the obvious part 3! A solicitor received a 16-month driving ban (to be reduced by 4 months on satisfactory completion of a drink drivers awareness course) and a fine which including costs totalled just under £5,000 after her decision to drive after consuming alcohol led to her crashing into a lamp post.

And on the topic of disciplinary action…. the SRA have released a joint statement with the SDT, to advise their overall approach to referring cases to the Tribunal. In short expect to see less referrals to the independent Tribunal and more fines and larger fines coming from the SRA direct. On the one hand this could be viewed positively: SRA fines are far less stressful and costly than being prosecuted to a Tribunal. However the SRA has now effectively given itself the authority to re-write the benchmark for fining levels and we are already starting to propose fines at levels which we just did not see from the Disciplinary Tribunal. Fines have gone from being a purely academic consideration for most firms to a very real prospect for running into fairly common problems. Just this week we saw the SRA fine a firm £5,000.00 for failing to have its Anti-Money Laundering procedures in the shape the SRA expects.

How are you managing your GDPR compliance requirements?

GDPR added a significant compliance burden on DPOs and data processors. Data breaches must be reported to the authorities within 72 hours, each new data processing activity needs to be documented and Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIA) must be carried out for processing that is likely to result in a high risk to individuals. Penalties for breaching GDPR can reach into the tens of millions of Euros.

“In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.”