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Let your next career move come to you.

This is likely to chill a few Roffer's blood this morning...

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/solicitor-struck-off-over-misleading-time-records/5119074.article

 

On the face of it,  yet another instance of the SRA/SDT going after a young and relatively inexperienced lawyer. 

If it was a 1-off, surely a short suspension would have been appropriate punishment?

That is genuinely the most absurd thing I have ever read in a professional context. To say nothing of failing to distinguish between chargeable and non chargeable time. 1 April come early again, can’t these people Google ‘embargo’. 

"'Ordering the strike-off, the tribunal added: ‘All solicitors, irrespective of their experience, knew that it was improper to record time for work that had not been performed."

The journo should be struck-off for not closing the quote, and presumably we can expect to see every US firm padding joker up before the regulatory beak soon on this basis? 

This is exactly why time recording is so fvcking stupid

He had to pretend that he was less efficient than he actually was to his employers because reasons

Idiocy all round

Oh, did they do that with Henry too? Was proper annoyed the way they split the 6th season of Sopranos. Just so they could sell two box sets for the same season. 

If he genuinely spent 20 minutes of my day chatting about an old file within a work context then he's entitled to put his time down. Hugh James doesn't have to bill the client but it ought to look after its solicitor. Worse than Rumpole. 

I assume he was padding his day rather than billing, he recorded it as non chargeable so the client was never going to suffer. 

In my day I nipped down to the law library to do some “research” if things were a bit slow. 

Having skimmed the report I have to say that I hope that the 3  members of the SDT panel hang their heads in shame.

Hopefully former colleagues, friends and neighbors  of these ghastly folk can bring to the public's attention when they have made errors, and they can be hauled in front of their own Star Chamber.

But we know that they won't because the SRA and SDT protect their own, but love to give good kickings to young lawyers.

Mr Nally and his chums are a disgrace to the profession, not Mr Nester. 

Interesting. 

 

Back in the day at one of my old firms there was a job all the junior lawyers wanted..  the business name registration files.  There were hundreds of them and every so often each one had to be renewed and or billed annually for the firm acting as their principal place of business.  

The firm had a precedent database for every step of the process, and it took almost no time to do each step of the process. 

Yet the firm also had a set and exact amount of time that was to be billed per step of the process. i.e this letter was 4 units. Each files/ renewal was done on a fixed fee basis and the client never saw the time entries they just got a bill for the fixed fee. 

In practice it meant you could bill almost a full day out of less than an hour's work ... due to the number of files. 

Is that not also intentionally misleading time recording with no effect on the client billings? 

Or is real issue here the intention to mislead his employer about the amount of work performed?

I suspect that in this case the firm had other issues with the lawyer involved and this was just an easy way to get rid of him without making the firm look bad.

 

Telephoning to Counsel’s chambers to confirm receipt of letter - 6 mins 

This note - 6 mins.

One minute’s work. Or a five minute hour, if you will. Abracadabra 

Yeah exactly what Donny and others have said

Hugh James like other high street firms have weaponised the professional rules for their own petty HR admin convenience. 

All seniors (and the larger firms that then pick up on these cases for “training”) do this to chill, chide and bully juniors. The SRA is happy to go along cos they get a regular conveyer belt of minor cases to justify their existence. 

Thing is, this hypocrisy by both seniors and SRA is all based on the assumptions the SRA (or its equivalent) will never use the same rules / mechanics on them.

Gawd but a change is over due  for  this profession and it’s regulators and it should start with the SRA 

If it doesn’t change it should be replaced with a government agency 

  •  * click click* 

Wake up! It’s the UK, they can’t even fix the Post Office and the Government is the sole shareholder there and they’ve known it’s a problem for basically a decade 

 

 

Lol. So many professional services firms would get into trouble if this were actually regulated in some way.

I am actually of the opinion that this would benefit the knowledge worker though rather than the manager. 

Most of the time it's project managers passing out crap for timesheets. Sometimes when you actually look at the options you have for billing time to it is completely impossible to understand what the hell the project managers on either side of the equation (consultancy and customer) even meant when they came up with some of the work streams.

'er, so does X qualify as 'management speak waffle', 'zeitgeist change management buzzword' or '(unintelligible series of abstract nouns picked at random from a PPT)'?'

'Ahhhh...I don't know yah?! Put it down as all three. It's probably all three yah. Wicked. Wicked nice'.

Their headquarters in Cardiff won ‘Best Corporate Workplace’ for the South of England and South Wales at the prestigious BCO (British Council for Offices) awards in 2019. The award recognises the huge focus the firm has put on developing a first-class working environment for staff in the premium office location in Wales.

This is the most absurd thing I have ever seen.

The peak of Kafkaesque Compliance Culture Lawfare hell. But only the peak for a short while. Just wait until AI etc is monitoring all this. You should consider all employment rights null and void as it will be trivially easy to remove people without severance. Even the most honest will have made an actionable error somewhere.

Presume it works the other way too. So if anyome senior ever suggests that you dont record in full - you are now under an obligation to report them to the SRA. And if SRA is on the least bit consistent that person must be removed from the profession.. 

Can you just imagine if everyone sent every suspected instance of misrecording to the SRA?

Seriously - if this judgement is to stand then justice demands that the entire £30 odd billion UK legal industry must be shut down or suspended immediately whilst we work out whether there are any firms not riddled with dishonest practices of such a scale they require immediate closure.

 

Seriously - If I were this guy I would demand the industry as a whole be shut down and launch a judicial review when they tell him to fook off.

If nothing else it would be a great way to launch a social media account.

The SRA is so mad they are going to end up with something crazy like this happening. They will lose the court of public opinion in seconds. Lawyers take honesty seriously and even we are perplexed. Joe public will see this (quite rightly tbh) - as Post Office mk II

It all gets back the ludicrous mantra that any 'dishonesty' merits a striking off. The SRA, SDT and Divisional Court (up to now) see these things, quite stupidly, as being binary. 

But we all know that that there are white lies, lies without consequence, stupid cover-ups and outright dishonesty.

Sorry Mr X, I didn't see your e-mail until this morning...

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