Email: Solicitor doctored messages he sent himself
A solicitor who fabricated emails in a way that pinned the blame for a missed deadline on his secretary has been struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT).
William Peter Dooley admitted creating emails he knew to be false, misleading his client and then his supervising partner by claiming that a secretary’s typo meant he missed the deadline for an appeal against a bank compensation award.
The SDT, which described the misconduct as “clearly dishonest”, also criticised the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) for increasing costs by referring the case to an external law firm when Mr Dooley admitted the misconduct and reported himself to the SRA.
In a statement of agreed facts and outcome with the solicitor, the SRA said Mr Dooley, admitted in 2015, was a senior associate in the banking finance and litigation department of Dorset and London law firm Ellis Jones.
Ellis Jones was instructed in April 2020 by Clients A and B, to pursue complaints with the Royal Bank of Scotland. The clients were siblings and Person A, Client A’s daughter, provided instructions on behalf of her mother.
Under a complaints scheme managed by the bank’s global restructuring group (GRG), complainants could “in some circumstances, to apply for consequential losses over and above the standard amount that could be awarded”.
The clients received standard compensation in March 2021 and the GRG rejected their consequential loss claims three months later. Mr Dooley was instructed to appeal against this to an independent third party (ITP) by 19 August for Client A and 20 August for Client B.
Due to ill-health within the clients’ family, the solicitor was asked to apply for an extension to the deadlines.
He did not do so. Instead, on or around 27 August, he created letters dated 13 August that were supposedly to be sent to ‘apeals@itp.org.uk’ – i.e. incorrectly spelt.
The SRA said: “An apparent typographical error, which caused an appeal to not be filed in time, would more likely allow an appeal filed late to be accepted.”
The letters were attached to an email dated 27 August that also purported to be part of an email chain forwarding previous emails from Mr Dooley on 24 and 25 August.
In fact, he had sent himself emails and then manually amending the recipients and time of the email to appear as if he had emailed Person A and Client B on those two days.
The SRA said the clients “would likely assume” they had not received the emails “due to some IT issue”.
The clients contacted the ITP directly in March 2022, which confirmed it had no record of appeal applications.
Mr Dooley told his supervising partner that the deadlines had been missed, saying his secretary sent the email with the wrong email address.
Ellis Jones received a pre-action letter of claim from the clients in June 2022. The law firm responded by launching an inquiry and bringing in an independent IT company.
Mr Dooley later admitted what he had done and that his secretary had “no involvement” it.
The SRA said his misconduct was “pre-meditated and repeated”.
In non-agreed mitigation, Mr Dooley said he was “balancing the demands of a young family (with a child born in June 2021) alongside a demanding professional role”.
But he accepted that he should be struck off.
The SDT said that since the solicitor admitted the misconduct during his law firm’s investigation and reported himself to the SRA, the regulator’s decision to instruct Blake Morgan “increased costs unnecessarily”.
Removing the VAT element of the SRA’s claimed costs, which would not have been there if the regulator had used an in-house lawyer, the tribunal cut Mr Dooley’s agreed costs from £19,500 to £16,900.
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