An employment barrister who mimicked and mocked opposing counsel and their instructing solicitor during a tribunal hearing has been fined £1,500.

Althea Brown, of Doughty Street Chambers, was found to have ‘undermined, insulted, humiliated and/or annoyed’ her opponent, referred to as NC, during a two-day hearing in 2019.

She imitated NC by ‘silently mouthing her words when the judge was not looking’ and ‘repeatedly made reference to her seniority over NC’, the Bar Tribunals & Adjudication Service (BTAS) found.

Brown, called to the bar in 1995, also mimicked NC’s instructing solicitor, referred to as VW, by ‘silently mouthing the words VW had said in an exaggerated fashion’, the tribunal said.

She was found to have repeated NC’s submissions in ‘a noticeably different and disrespectful tone of voice to her usual voice, accompanied by exaggerated body language’, and suggested that her opponent had a ‘fundamental intellectual difficulty’ in understanding her case.

The tribunal also found that Brown distracted NC and the judge during her opponent’s submissions by ‘repeatedly gesturing in an exaggerated and/or audible way and/or sighing loudly’ and ‘repeatedly spoke over NC and the judge’.

Brown compared NC’s submissions to the words of Violet Elizabeth Bott – a recurring character in the Just William books, who said ‘I’m going to scream and scream until I’m sick’ – which the tribunal said unfairly suggested that NC was ‘behaving in a juvenile and/or petulant manner’.

She also accused her opponent of making an untruthful statement to the employment tribunal without a reasonable basis, the tribunal held.

Brown was found to have failed to observe her duty to the court and ‘behaved in a way which is likely to diminish the trust and confidence which the public places in her or the profession and/or abused her role as an advocate’.

She was reprimanded, fined £1,500 and ordered to pay the BSB’s costs in the sum of £5,820. The tribunal’s decision, the reasons for which are yet to be published in full, is open to appeal.