A solicitor who tried to intimidate a complaining client by threatening an injunction against her has accepted a year-long suspension.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal heard that Kate Austen, while a consultant with Devon firm Dunn & Baker, sent three emails referring to legal action if the client pursued her complaint.
Austen admitted her conduct was inappropriate and said she has since left the adversarial field of litigation to pursue a career in-house.
She made an agreed outcome with the Solicitors Regulation Authority that she should be suspended for 12 months and pay £25,000 costs. This was rubber-stamped by the tribunal at a hearing last month.
Austen, 41, who qualified as a solicitor in September 2012, had emailed the client after a long-running dispute over unpaid divorce fees.
The client had declined to pay the firm’s costs of around £34,000 and made a complaint, with the firm initiating liquidation to recover the debt.
Following a mediation process, the client and firm reached an agreement that she should pay £25,000 but she then started to assert that she was coerced or placed under undue influence to sign the agreement.
Austen wrote to the client saying that unless she withdraw any complaint by 4pm on the same day, then ‘we will not hesitate to issue an application for an injunction to prohibit you from making or continuing with any complaint to the legal ombudsman or the SRA’.
The email went on to state that if the client breached the injunction she would be in contempt of court and liable to be imprisoned and to pay the firm’s costs.
The client replied that she strongly disagreed with Austen’s assessment of the settlement process and alleged that she was ‘bullied and blackmailed’ into signing a gagging order.
Austen then repeated her threat of an injunction unless the complaint was immediately withdrawn, adding: ‘For the further avoidance of doubt, I will not hesitate to show this communication to the court.’
Austen admitted to the tribunal the content of these emails was ‘oppressive and inappropriate’, as well as intimidating. They imposed excessively short deadlines for the client to respond and were designed to stop the client from making a complaint. Austen further admitted the correspondence ‘reflected an abusive approach to litigation’ by threatening meritless claims and adverse costs consequences which were exaggerated.
The tribunal said: ‘This case serves as a stark reminder to the profession of the importance of remaining measured in their communications, particularly when corresponding with members of the public, and of ensuring that they have regard for their professional and regulatory obligations whilst communicating in the course of litigation.’
In her own mitigation, Austen said the adversarial nature of litigation no longer aligned with her personal and professional values, and that removing herself from high-conflict working environments has had a positive and stabilising effect on her.
