Strike-off for solicitor who deleted and lied about email

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Email: Log showed solicitor had deleted message

A solicitor at a national law firm who deleted a client’s email from its document management system (DMS) “to try to cover up that he had not dealt with it” has been struck off.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) heard that Christopher James Hawkes, who worked for Clarke Wilmott, later denied both to his supervising partner and to the client that he had received the email.

The SDT said Mr Hawkes, who admitted acting dishonestly, had “deliberately misled both his client and his supervising partner”.

In a statement of agreed facts and outcome with Mr Hawkes, approved by the SDT, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) said the solicitor was working in the private client and commercial litigation team at Clarke Wilmott’s Southampton office when he took over conduct of a debt case in September 2021.

Client A had instructed the firm to serve a statutory demand on one of its debtors.

Mr Hawkes, born in 1972 and qualified in 2021, wrote to the client in January 2022, attaching the draft demand and saying that, subject to the client’s approval, it should be personally served.

At the end of March 2022, Mr Hawkes was instructed him to serve the demand and confirm when it had been done. The solicitor replied the following month, saying it had been served by post.

Client A emailed on 26 May 2022, saying: “Hi Chris, can you also confirm that this was hand delivered also? If not, please can you ensure it is?”.

Mr Hawkes filed the email on the DMS that same day but never replied to it. He received a further email from Client A, sent both to him and his supervising partner, Owen Williams, asking for an update on the case on 14 September.

Mr Williams forwarded the email to him with a question mark. Mr Hawkes did not reply and instead, later that day, deleted Client A’s email from the DMS.

The following day, in response to another email from Mr Williams, Mr Hawkes said he did not recall receiving the May email and, at his supervisor’s request, told the client that there was no trace of the email on the firm’s system.

Mr Williams, with the help of Clarke’s Wilmott’s IT department, discovered both the email and an activity log showing Mr Hawkes had deleted it.

A week later, at a disciplinary hearing, Mr Hawkes accepted that he had removed the email “to try to cover up that he had not dealt with it”, and the firm dismissed him for gross misconduct. Clarke Wilmott notified the SRA.

In non-agreed mitigation, the solicitor said he was suffering “from a depressive disorder of moderate severity at the material time, which may have impacted on his decision making”.

He was “employed in a very junior role and was working at home, in an isolated working environment” and felt “out of his depth and unable to ask for support from his supervisors”.

The consequences of the deletion “have had a grave and irreversible impact on his professional career and he has also suffered from health problems following the incident”.

Mr Hawkes was struck off and ordered to pay £5,000 in costs.