A veteran solicitor who largely ignored the Solicitors Regulation Authority for two years after closing his firm has been suspended and fined.
Officers from the Solicitors Regulation Authority even attended the home address of sole practitioner Grenville Young, admitted in 1981, to intervene in his practice, only to be told repeatedly to ‘go away’ and have the door shut on them.
They eventually spoke to Young’s wife who said he had been too ill to engage with the SRA intervention. He refused further invitations to answer questions and did not hand over any files, client monies or confirm details about the storage of files.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal heard that Young had failed to cooperate with the SRA’s investigations from 2019 onwards, after he had informed the regulator that he intended to close the firm and practise as a freelancer.
Young did not complete the firm closure notification form for two years after it had shut. When he did finally post the form in 2022, it highlighted several outstanding issues including the existence of two live files. The firm also held £17,864.77 in the client account and 50 wills and deeds needed to be returned or stored, while Young had not paid for run-off cover for the period after closure. Young stated in a letter accompanying the form that the firm’s closed files and any files generated from working as a freelance solicitor were being stored in a self-storage unit in Portsmouth until they could be properly shredded.
The tribunal found that he rarely responded to communications and when he did offer a response, he did not provide the SRA with substantive answers. Offers of reasonable adjustments to take account of his illness were ignored.
The refusal to accept emails, post and telephone calls from the SRA meant that the organisation could not establish the beneficiaries of client monies and clients had to be paid redress from the compensation fund.
In its ruling, the tribunal said: ‘This case presented a warning that experienced professionals could make serious errors in judgment.
‘Solicitors have a duty of care to their clients even after deciding to cease operating a firm, and solicitors cannot afford to forget or simply not meet this obligation. As legal professionals, they should ensure they have retained professional objectivity and seek help from the regulator where there was a danger of such objectivity being compromised.’
Young was suspended for two years, fined £20,000 and ordered to pay £11,940 costs.
