A London firm has successfully appealed an ordered that its former solicitor be paid a £7,866 commission on top of his salary.
The London Central Employment Tribunal had ruled in March 2023 that boutique firm Raymond Saul & Co LLP should pay the bonus to newly-qualified solicitor Billy Rashbrook.
Rashbrook’s contract had stipulated that he would receive 20% of profit costs invoiced by him if these were at least three times his annual £38,000 salary.
On appeal in Raymond Saul & Co LLP v Mr Billy Rashbrook, High Court deputy judge Andrew Burns KC ruled that this 20% clause was subject to three conditions: the amounts should have been invoiced by Rashbrook, they were subsequently paid by clients to the firm and they should be in respect of work carried out by him. Any amounts which were not in respect of work carried out by him would not fall to be aggregated for his commission.
Burns added: ‘The contract should be construed so that the claimant only earns commission from the profit costs exceeding the threshold which were in respect of his work and not the work of any of his colleagues, including partners, fee-earners and trainee solicitor.’
The firm submitted that even being generous about the proportion of profit costs that were down to him, Rashbrook ‘did not come close’ to exceeding the three times salary threshold in order to start earning commission. It suggested this was unsurprising for someone who, at the time, was in his first year of qualifying.
Burns said the employment tribunal was wrong to find no evidence of the firm keeping the necessary records to apportion work done by the solicitor. Indeed, this finding was ‘perverse’ given the time recording system employed by the firm. The judge said that even on a conservative estimate, 35% of the work on Rashbrook’s file could be assigned to trainees and other fee-earners.
‘I think it is fanciful to think that the claimant would be able to satisfy any reasonable ET that he did sufficient work during the commission year in order to cross the commission threshold,’ added Burns. The claim was dismissed.
