The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has thrown out a case against a senior associate accused of sending misleading emails to clients and her firm’s professional standards team noting her heavy workload, limited administrative support, and the ‘too high’ expectations placed on her.
Davina Charlton, admitted in November 2016, was a senior associate at Nelsons Solicitors Limited’s wills and probate private client team, based in Derby, at the time of the alleged misconduct.
She was accused of sending correspondence to her client’s daughter and son-in-law which she knew or ought to have known was misleading as she omitted to tell them that the client’s applications for lasting powers of attorneys (LPAs) had been sent to the office of the public guardian (OPG) in April 2022, rather than in November 2021. Charlton was also alleged to have sent correspondence to the firm’s professional standards team.
Charlton denied all the allegations against her including that her conduct was reckless.
The tribunal found that Charlton ‘genuinely believed that client A’s LPAs were sent to the OPG in November 2021’.The three-person panel said the emails were ‘factually correct’. The SDT accepted that ‘at the time of sending the [April] email she did not recall that she wrote to the OPG sending the LPAs [the previous day] because she had so many matters and was simply “firefighting” these owing to the professional and personal pressures she faced at the time’.
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The judgment said: ‘The tribunal accepted her evidence that when writing the email Ms Charlton had no intention to mislead Person B and Person C. It considered the extraordinary personal and professional pressures she was under at the material time, including her workload of around 130 files with limited administrative support through IO and Richo, both systems having let Ms Charlton down in the past (as she had raised with those senior to her in the firm).’
The SDT found Charlton ‘did not mislead by omission in her emails and that her emails were honest’ noting ‘the expectations expected of her at the material time were too high’.
‘It accepted her evidence that she was over worked and given limited administrative support. She was firefighting in order to keep her work commitments moving and supporting and supervising the team in Derby in the absence of a partner in that office.’
Dismissing the first allegation, the SDT said: ‘The SRA relied heavily on the disciplinary meeting notes…in the absence of evidence from the author of the meeting notes. The meeting notes were not agreed with Ms Charlton, and she was not interviewed about the meeting notes by the SRA during the investigation. She was only asked about the meeting notes when she was unrepresented. The tribunal determined that it was not in the interests of justice to attach significant weight to this evidence particularly in the absence of any witness called by the SRA to deal with the disciplinary meetings in August 2022.’
The SDT also dismissed the second allegation finding Charlton’s email ‘did not seek to mislead’ and was ‘factually accurate’. It found Charlton’s evidence ‘compelling and the SRA did not present any evidence to contradict her position about the difficulties she faced managing her heavy caseload’.
The allegations against Charlton were dismissed and no costs order was made.
