High Court: Appeal dismissed
The High Court has rejected an appeal by a solicitor suspended for a year for engaging in “persistent, abusive litigation conduct”.
Mrs Justice Lang held that the findings of the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) – including Scott Halborg’s suggestion that his actions were actually “noble” – were “fully justified on the evidence”.
We reported last year that Mr Halborg was suspended after being made subject to a general civil restraint order and two limited civil restraint orders (the CROs).
Although Mr Halborg claimed that he presented himself as a private litigant, he repeatedly signed pleadings and statements of truth in his capacity as a solicitor and partner at Leicester firm Deals and Disputes Solicitors.
Lang J dismissed multiple grounds of appeal, such as that the SDT improperly relied on extraneous material to go beyond the agreed statement of facts he had signed with the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA).
“It is the practice of courts and tribunals to consider all the evidence before them unless it has been found to be inadmissible or irrelevant. It is common for courts to consider statements of agreed facts on specific issues, whilst other issues remain in dispute, and must be determined on the evidence,” she said.
“In this case, the issue of integrity was in dispute, and the tribunal was entitled to have regard to all the evidence in determining it, and when determining sanction.”
The 15-week delay in the SDT announcing its decision and publishing written reasons was not a procedural irregularity, while Lang J was “puzzled” by Mr Halborg’s complaint that this made it impossible to renew professional indemnity insurance and led to the forced closure of his firm.
The solicitor would have been able to provide the insurers with details of the facts, the allegations proved and the sanction imposed, she said. “The judgment would not have made any difference to the assessment of risk.”
She rejected too Mr Halborg’s argument that the SRA and SDT had treated imposition of the CROs as evidence of professional misconduct.
“The focus of the SRA and the tribunal was the seriousness of the appellant’s underlying conduct which led to the CROs… It was not open to the appellant to seek to go behind the CROs and contend that they were wrongly made when he had not successfully appealed against them.”
The SDT had rejected his assertion that the underlying motivation for his conduct was “noble”. On appeal, he said the tribunal had misunderstood the submission made, which was that he was “noble” because he intervened in one claim to replace his parents as defendants.
Lang J said: “In my view, the ‘nobility’ submission was a highly selective plea by way of mitigation, which portrayed the appellant in a way which was so strikingly at odds with his self-serving and combative behaviour towards his parents and their legal representatives as to be misleading.
“Therefore I consider that the tribunal was entitled to reject any characterisation of the appellant as ‘noble’.”
She concluded by upholding the SDT’s findings, decision on sanction and order that Mr Halborg pay costs of £30,630, as well as the SRA’s decision before the SDT hearing to impose an interim condition on his practising certificate preventing his involvement in litigation work.
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