Bates: Appeal not progressed competently
The High Court has thrown out a solicitor’s appeal against a decision of the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) because she failed to provide grounds for more than four months after filing it.
Alan Bates, sitting as a deputy High Court judge, said he would in any case have rejected the appeal by Sadaf Ijaz on the substantive points she raised.
He was highly critical of the way Ms Ijaz, who runs Safaz Legal in Birmingham, which represented her in the case, approached both the SDT proceedings and the appeal.
“A feature of the way these proceedings have been conducted on her behalf has been a high degree of failure to comply with procedural requirements and to progress the appeal competently…
“I do not know whether the appellant’s litigation conduct has been part of a deliberate strategy to impede and delay the progress of proceedings, or is attributable to an unduly casual approach to procedural requirements and deadlines, or has some other underlying cause.
“But I find it troubling that a solicitor on whom clients rely for legal advice and assistance has apparently been unable to ensure that her own proceedings were conducted competently.”
Last year, the SDT rejected Ms Ijaz’s appeal against a rebuke imposed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, upheld by an adjudication panel, for failing to comply with two court costs orders.
She filed the notice to appeal just in time on 12 November but did not include grounds of appeal until 31 March this year, ahead of the hearing on 16 April.
Judge Bates subsequently refused two applications for an adjournment.
On the morning of the hearing, Ms Ijaz’s law firm sent a five-page document headed ‘Speaking Note’ to the court but nobody appeared on her behalf at the hearing.
In a decision issued last week, Judge Bates said Ms Ijaz was not “free to take as long as she wished to provide her grounds for appeal, filing such grounds at a time of her choosing”.
On the contrary, having failed to file them with the appeal notice, she needed the court’s permission to rely on any grounds “she might belatedly seek to file”; she did not seek this.
“It follows, in my judgment, that she cannot rely on them. Moreover, had she made such an application, I would almost certainly have refused it.
“Absent some truly extraordinary circumstance (the existence and nature of which I am presently unaware), there can be no reasonable excuse for her failure to file any grounds of appeal for over 4 months after filing the appeal.
“Further, it was obviously prejudicial and unfair to the SRA that the appellant sought to introduce her grounds of appeal just 16 days before the listed hearing of the appeal.”
Accordingly, as there were no grounds to challenge the tribunal’s decision, the appeal had to be dismissed.
Judge Bates added that, even if he had admitted the proposed grounds of appeal, he would still have dismissed the appeal as none of the three grounds had “any merit”.
The first was that the SDT erred in assessing the SRA’s costs in a sum including VAT – a challenge the judge called “misconceived”.
The second was that it erred by refusing to hear her case in private. The SDT gave a “comprehensive” explanation of why it rejected that application, he noted, and it has “a substantial margin of discretion to manage its own proceedings”.
The final ground was that the SDT erred in not allowing the appeal despite Ms Ijaz showing that she had, in fact, applied for a stay of one of the costs orders.
“This ground is hopeless,” said Judge Bates. “As the SDT correctly observed in its judgment, it was required to assess the adjudication panel’s decision as a whole, taking into account the entirety of the reasoning provided.
“Even if the appellant had sought a stay of execution when appealing from the 2019 costs order, she had continued to fail to pay that costs order for many months after the appeal proceedings had come to an end.
“She had also, for a considerable period, failed to pay the 2022 costs order in similar circumstances. Against this background, a minor factual error by the adjudication panel was of no real materiality, and the SDT was entitled to uphold the imposition of the rebuke.”
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