SDT: SRA should have kept the matter in-house
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) has reprimanded a solicitor who did not comply with a direction from the Legal Ombudsman – but said it should not have reached the tribunal.
The SDT suggested it would have been better for the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) to sanction the misconduct of Claire Letitia Parry in-house.
Ms Parry, who qualified in 2003, was a sole practitioner at CLP Care Funding Solicitor in 2016 when LeO ordered her to refund £500 to a client and pay a further £200 in compensation for ‘frustration and inconvenience’. She stopped practising in 2017 without doing so.
LeO tried to engage with Ms Parry for several years – at one point even obtaining a court order – but she did not respond and the service eventually closed the case.
The fees were finally refunded by the SRA Compensation Fund in 2023, but the fund’s coverage did not extend to the £200 compensation.
Attempts by the SRA costs recovery team to recover the £900 from Ms Parry were unsuccessful due to her lack of cooperation and the disproportionate cost of pursuing legal action. It has now been written off.
Ms Parry was found also to have failed to co-operate with the SRA’s investigation between 2023 and 2024, and did not take part in the SDT hearing either.
The SDT was told Ms Parry had been subject to an SRA adjudication decision in June 2017, which included findings of failure to fully cooperate with LeO in relation to remedies for four other complaints.
The tribunal found both allegations proved but did not find that her lack of engagement amounted to a lack of integrity.
It explained: “There was little doubt that the respondent’s conduct would have eroded public trust and confidence in the solicitors’ profession and in legal services provided by authorised persons, however, standing back and viewing the conduct contextually, the facts did not substantiate that the respondent had lacked integrity.
“There was a disproportionality between what the respondent had done and the weight of the allegations which had been pleaded.”
There were, the SDT said, “hints and clues” within the SRA’s papers that Ms Parry had experienced “a difficult and possibly traumatic episode in her life at the relevant time of the allegations and which may have caused her to make poor choices”.
This was also a case where there had been a significant delay in its resolution. “The tribunal questioned whether matters could have been resolved by another method i.e. retained in-house by the [SRA].”
Ms Parry was of hitherto good character with an unblemished disciplinary record. The harm caused was “relatively low and limited in nature”, the SDT said.
A reprimand – the lowest sanction the SDT can impose – would suffice, it decided.
The SRA sought costs of £7,200 but the SDT awarded only £2,500, given that they would have been lower “had there been an earlier analysis of the real harm caused by the respondent’s misconduct and the matter kept in-house by the [SRA]”.
It noted too that, in 2017, Ms Parry had not been able to pay for her practising certificate, meaning it was “a reasonable inference that she was of limited means”.
There was “no benefit to any party in making an order which had no prospect of being paid within a reasonable time”.
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