Partner suspended for telling junior attorney to lie to client

Email: Junior counsel uncomfortable with instruction

A senior partner who told a newly qualified lawyer to lie in an email to a client has been suspended from practice for nine months.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) decided not to disbar Rajpal Panesar, the usual sanction in dishonesty cases, partly because the assistant refused and the email was not sent.

He told the court he acted as he did because his client “wouldn’t get called out on him”, but the SDT found that “being asked to lie at such an early stage in his career has clearly shaken (the “junior lawyer) in the profession”.

Mr Panesar, who qualified in 2004, was managing partner in the property department of national firm Taylor Rose and supervised Person A, who had only qualified three weeks before the incident.

On Friday 19 March 2021, Mr Panesar emailed the client to say he would arrange to send a report on the property that day. He instructed Person A to photocopy the documents to accompany the report and then upload the report.

According to the SDT, “Person A did not immediately act on this request, believing that there was no urgency.”

The following Monday, Panesar told the real estate agent involved that the report had been sent, without verifying that it had been.

The next day, Mr. Panesar asked Person A and was told they had not sent it. He rejected his proposal that the report could be sent by courier because the client would know he had misled them.

Person A wrote a cover email to the client, explaining that the report had not been sent earlier because there was a skeleton staff in the office due to Covid.

Mr. Panesar rewrote it so that Person A would send it on his behalf. He said, “The report was sent to you on Friday and returned to us today. The admin team has no reason why it was returned to us, so I checked with Raj and he confirmed that your address was (address), so I sent the report back to you along with all the documentation by first class mail today.”

Person A released the documents but declined to send this email, saying he was uncomfortable with it and preferred to provide an accurate account of what happened.

The lawyers had a phone conversation during which Panesar told the SDT: “Person A persuaded him that he should not put his anxiety ahead of his regulatory responsibilities. He said he saw the point of person A’s argument and by the end of the call had agreed that person A was right, that the misleading email should not have been sent.’

However, Person A maintained that at the end of the call, Mr Panesar continued to insist that he send the misleading email. Instead, he sent the email unedited and Mr. Panesar later emailed him to thank him.

The evidence of a colleague who was with Person A during the call with Mr Panesar said that Person A was crying.

The SDT explained: “Mr Panesar’s actions in altering the email in the way he did weighed heavily on Person A’s mind. At 11.00pm on 25 March 2021, he communicated the his concerns to the firm’s COLP He copied the email to the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

The SDT noted that ultimately the fact that the report was sent four days later had no impact on the customer or the transaction, which was completed successfully.

The SDT had to decide whether Mr Panesar had “instructed” Person A to send the email; his lawyer argued that the instructions existed “only if there was a definite intention to do something and the email he sent her was in draft form and sent”. like a question”.

The SDT found that Mr Panesar had given an instruction: “It was clear that he intended to send the amended email … It was not a matter for discussion.” However, he stressed that there was no threat of penalty for Person A.

Indeed, it was “more complicated to craft a false narrative for the client than to simply explain what had happened.”

By acting as he did, Mr Panesar had been dishonest and lacked integrity, he concluded.

Person A said the incident had “heavily” affected his mental health and well-being. “Immediately following this incident, Person A requested to transfer to a different office within the company,” the SDT said.

“Person A stated that he needed support for his mental health and had carefully considered whether he had a future in the legal profession for fear of a similar incident happening in the future. Person A reported that he had difficulty trusting his colleagues and described being “extremely cautious at work” since the incident.

By deciding not to dismiss Mr. Panesar, the SDT cited “the fact that the dishonesty between Mr. Panesar and Person A only lasted for a period of 90 minutes, was not premeditated, did not continue, as the offending email was not in fact . sent to (the customer), and did not impair the underlying transaction”.

In deciding to suspend him for nine months, the SDT “reflected his remorse, his admissions and the three years it took to bring this matter to court during which Mr Panesar was issued with an unconditional practicing certificate “.

He was also ordered to pay costs of £14,000.