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Harsh, yes. But inevitable. Lying in a witness statement is contempt of court. Changing dates on documents is forgery. These are serious criminal offences. Completely incompatible with being a solicitor, and officer of the court and a professional who can be trusted to the ends of the earth.

BUT... once again one wonders why the system is set up so that minor mistakes can have such serious consequences that time and time again solicitors feel pressurised into trying to hide the mistakes rather than come clean?

A District Judge once said to me that he recalled a time in the past where practitioners actually liked litigation as opposed to other areas of law, because - he said - if anything went wrong, you could always go before the District Judge and get it all sorted out.

Whether that's true or not, I don't know. But I think that Mitchell / Jackson probably has a lot to answer for.