A law firm manager who oversaw duplicated witness statements and a missed deadline has been rebuked by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
An SRA decision notice states that Masood Ahmad, a solicitor and the sole practitioner at Ealing firm Mass Law Limited, was found to have failed to properly supervise staff on two immigration matters.
In one case, a senior immigration caseworker had sent the Home Office witness statements containing 10 identical paragraphs from two separate clients in their asylum matters. The statements were sent two weeks apart in August 2023 and the duplication happened when the evidence from the first client’s statement had been wrongly include in the second client’s statement.
In another matter, in October 2024, the firm had been instructed to submit an urgent judicial review application for an asylum matter. Ahmad instructed a trainee solicitor to make the application.
A judge at the Upper Tribunal issued a 'show cause' notice requiring the firm to identify who was responsible for the JR application and who was supervising them. The SRA said the judge had asked for this ‘because the application was so poorly prepared and lacked any merits’.
The firm was given a week to respond to the judge’s concerns, but Ahmad's response arrived 19 days after the deadline. The matters were reported to the SRA.
The regulator said Ahmad had failed to adequately supervise a paralegal’s work and case files, and had allowed a non-authorised person to issue a judicial review application.
‘Mr Ahmad is an experienced solicitor, manager and sole supervisor at the firm,’ added the SRA. ‘Although the allegation only involved two matters, they were caused by Mr Ahmad’s failure to put in place effective supervision at the firm. The firm carries out asylum and immigration work. The clients in the two matters were vulnerable and at risk of serious detriment because of the improper and inadequate conduct of their matters.’
The regulator added that a more serious sanction was not considered proportionate because Ahmad had implemented an effective supervision system and co-operated with the investigation.
