SDT: No honest explanation for conduct
A partner whose “head in the sand” approach meant a case spiralled out of control after he failed to serve points of dispute on a bill of costs in time has been struck off.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) said Daniel James Skinner, who at the time was a partner at South London firm Capsticks, had been dishonest in what he told his client once they learned directly from the opposing solicitors that a default costs certificate (DCC) had been issued.
Though Mr Skinner provided “credible” evidence of the “unsustainable working arrangements” he faced, this did not mitigate the dishonesty, the tribunal decided.
Mr Skinner, who qualified in 1993, specialised in leasehold litigation and disrepair work, and was head of a cross-office team. He left Capsticks around November 2021.
He had acted for ‘Client A’ in their unsuccessful possession claim against Person B in 2019. Default judgment was entered in Person B’s counterclaim and Client A was ordered to pay Person B’s costs.
In October 2019, Person B’s solicitors, ‘GCS’, filed a notice to start the costs assessment. Mr Skinner instructed a costs lawyer to prepare points of dispute, which were received a week before the deadline. But Mr Skinner did not send them to the court until two days after it.
In the meantime, GCS had applied for a DCC for £22,888, which was granted. Mr Skinner did not tell the client and there was no evidence he did anything at all until April 2020, when he saved it onto the firm’s system.
He still did nothing for another year, when GCS sent the DCC directly to Client A, who asked how it had come about.
Mr Skinner raised “a smokescreen” in response, the SDT said, rather than consider whether to seek to set the DCC aside or at least pay it to limit the interest that was accruing.
At same point in mid-May 2021, Capsticks transferred the money for the costs. GCS said there was still interest of nearly £4,000 to pay, but Mr Skinner did not respond or notify his client, even as GCS obtained a charging order against a property owned by Client A in October 2021.
Once again, Client A only became aware of what was happening when GCS contacted them directly. They paid the interest and complained to Capsticks.
Capsticks reimbursed Client A the interest and deducted it from the sum owing to Mr Skinner on his departure from the firm.
Mr Skinner blamed “the intense and unsustainable workload under which he was operating” for his inaction. He told the SDT his caseload was over 200 cases, while “a usual or sustainable caseload would have been around 50 cases”.
He recounted that he was “firefighting” in trying to identify urgent tasks on his files and that the firm failed to provide the additional assistance he sought.
“As deadlines were missed generally, [Mr Skinner] offered clients the opportunity to switch to alternative representation as he was conscious that they were not receiving a satisfactory service. [He] was responding to around 60 emails a day and he said he was aware that many emails were routinely left unread and unactioned on a daily basis.”
The SDT “found it likely, but could not be certain” that he had read GCS’s email of 15 November 2019, informing him of the DCC application, but he had clearly become aware of it by April 2020.
“Notwithstanding the wider professional pressures that the respondent was operating under and his unsustainable working arrangements at the firm (on which the respondent had provided credible evidence) the tribunal found that he had opportunities to ensure that Client A was notified of the true position, both in the course of his communications in the proceedings and in the course of his regular interactions with Client A, yet failed to do so.”
Despite evidence of his “exemplary professional history”, the SDT said there was not an honest explanation for his conduct.
In mitigation, Mr Skinner’s counsel argued that it had been “a single episode born out of desperation when he was unable to stay on top of an unsustainable workload”.
But the SDT found that, as a partner, he could have delegated the work; it was “unacceptable” to blame a lack of sufficient time for what happened. He had, it said, adopted a “‘head in the sand’ approach” to Client A’s matter.
Mr Skinner’s “primary motivation was avoiding owning the errors made on the file, and his secondary motivation was to minimise the time needed to deal with the file and to resolve the problems that had arisen from his omissions”, the SDT went on.
Had he “grasped the nettle”, he could have resolved the issues arising from the DCC and reduced his overall work burden. “Instead, he created more work for himself repeatedly by causing Person B to escalate matters.”
A finding of dishonesty means a strike-off unless there are exceptional circumstances, and the SDT cited High Court authority that “pressure of work or of working conditions cannot ever justify dishonesty by a solicitor”.
It concluded there were no exceptional circumstances here and struck Mr Skinner off. He was also ordered to pay costs of nearly £31,000.