A male law firm partner who sexually harassed his female junior colleague on a staff night out has been suspended for two years – but he cannot be named. The married man, a solicitor for 15 years, admitting making sexually aggressive comments to the woman who he had met for the first time that night in June 2022 at a London pub.
He admitted saying out of the blue to his colleague: ‘I want to dominate you sexually’. In shock, she asked what he was saying and he repeated the sentence, adding ‘yeah you’d like it’ at least once. She told him to stop but he repeatedly replied: ‘You’d like it, you’d want it; I want to do it.’
She said to him: ‘I can’t believe you are saying this to me, half the firm we work for are employment lawyers, what are you saying to me?’
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal heard the woman was ‘shocked, really angry and really upset’. She walked out of the pub and cried on her way to the station. She said the firm where she worked prided itself on its ethics and not accepting such behaviour so she had not imagined it would happen.
The following day, the partner messaged her on the firm’s Teams chat facility to apologise and say his conduct had been ‘completely unacceptable’. He explained that he had a reputation for sometimes saying things that were completely inappropriate and asked to speak to her to personally apologise.
The partner reported himself to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, indicating that the firm had conducted an internal investigation and he had resigned two days after its report.
In mitigation, the partner submitted he had been under personal pressure due to marriage issues and he was exhausted after a three-week overseas trip which had taken him away from his young children. This over-exhaustion, combined with not having attended social events for so long during lockdown, contributed to his out-of-character behaviour. He had not appreciated the complainant was more junior than him because she worked in a different office.
The tribunal accepted an agreed outcome between the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the respondent. The misconduct was deemed deliberate and serious, but did not justify a strike-off. The solicitor agreed to pay £32,655 costs.
The tribunal took the unusual decision at the start of the case to anonymise the partner after a joint application from him and the SRA. A jointly instructed medical expert submitted that publication of the full judgment posed a risk to the solicitor's life and contravene his right to life and to a private and family life.
The two solicitor members of the tribunal panel backed anonymity. The lay member dissented, saying the public needed to know the partner’s name and professional details, and saying the principle of open justice outweighed the partner’s interests.
