Signature: Solicitor failed to check what he was authorising
A former partner at a national law firm has been reprimanded for a minor rule breach after the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) withdrew more serious allegations a few days before his disciplinary hearing.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) said a sanction “at the lowest level” was justified after Peter Albany Baker, at the time a commercial property partner at Freeths, admitted authorising a payment of £3,800 from the wrong client account.
Mr Baker, who qualified in 1995, retired as a partner in November 2022, worked as a consultant on a zero-hours contract until October 2023 and is now fully retired.
The case had been listed for a four-day hearing starting on 5 October, but on 30 September the SRA applied for the SDT to approve a statement of agreed outcome and proposed sanction instead.
As part of this, the regulator dropped allegations that Mr Baker had been dishonestly sent title reports to a bank stating that searches had been carried out on six properties when they had not.
The SRA said it had withdrawn the allegations after Freeths provided “further documents and information” last month. As a result, the regulator “no longer considered that it was able to discharge the burden of proof”.
The SRA is meant to submit agreed outcomes at least 28 days before a hearing but the SDT decided that the application here was “appropriate” after taking into account the explanation for the late filing, Mr Baker’s support for the application, and the overriding objective, “including the need to deal with proceedings fairly and justly and at proportionate cost”.
The only remaining allegation was that, in January 2022, Mr Baker wrongly authorised a payment of £3,800 from one client’s account to pay the completion fee on a property for another.
In non-agreed mitigation, Mr Baker apologised for the breach, saying that the payment request form had been prepared by a legal assistant and, when authorising it, he “did not check the name on the form against the matter to which the completion related”.
He stressed that he took responsibility for the error.
Mr Baker said it was a single, “inadvertent” breach which gave him no benefit and caused no loss to any client. It was “an isolated departure in a long career”.
The SDT agreed that there was “no identifiable harm caused to any individual, and the risk of any such harm was negligible”. Mr Baker had “demonstrated genuine insight into his misconduct” and the likelihood of future misconduct of a similar nature was low.
But it was “nevertheless too serious to warrant taking no action”, so the SDT reprimanded Mr Baker, the lowest sanction available, and ordered him to pay costs of almost £2,000.
It is very unlikely that the case would have been referred the SDT had it just concerned this one allegation.
We reported yesterday [1] that one in five contested cases before the SDT in 2024-25 did not lead to any finding against the respondent solicitor, by far the highest in recent years.