A solicitor who misled an employment tribunal about ‘IT issues’ has lost her anonymity and been struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.
Alison Clare Banerjee, 60, specialised in employment law at Peterborough firm Hunt and Coombs, where she acted in the employment tribunal for an individual identified as Client A.
An application to amend Client A’s claim was made and a preliminary hearing was listed on 15 June 2022 to deal with the parts of that application which were contested. At the start of the hearing, Banerjee informed the ET that she withdrew the application in respect of the contested amendments.
Banerjee, admitted in 2010, claimed IT issues had prevented her from receiving an email from Capsticks setting out the defendant’s position and a draft list of issues until ‘shortly before’ the hearing. Capsticks made an application for wasted costs, which Banerjee did not oppose.
Banerjee also stated she had ‘sought assistance from her IT department’ as to the cause of her problems with her emails and had been advised that the security system Mimecast, which works alongside Microsoft Outlook, had been partially disabled on her account, which ‘resulted in a number of emails…being caught but not notified to her that they were on hold’.
But her firm found no record of Banerjee raising an issue internally and there were no IT tickets about it. Although Banerjee had experienced issues with Mimecast previously, they had been resolved by August 2020.
At the SDT, Banerjee admitted she provided misleading information to the ET. She also admitted she told Client A that a wasted costs order for £2,597.64 made by the order was due to ‘confusion’ and she would ask the tribunal to remove it from its website.
She also admitted agreeing to a settlement offer on Client A’s claim without the client’s instructions or knowledge, misleading Client A and also misleading two other clients in separate matters.
In mitigation, Banerjee said ‘She felt as though her only option was to tell the clients what they wanted to hear, simply to stop them from continuously emailing her.’
An SDT panel ruled to strike Banerjee off the roll, stating: ‘The misconduct involved serious, deliberate, and repeated acts of dishonesty, misleading both clients and the employment tribunal over a period of time.’
