The solicitor confessed to not only misleading the employment tribunal but her own clients too
The UK Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has struck off employment law solicitor Alison Clare Banerjee for citing false IT concerns and misleading the employment tribunal, reported the Law Society Gazette.
Banerjee was representing a client before the employment tribunal on behalf of Peterborough firm Hunt and Coombs. She applied to amend the client’s claim, and a preliminary hearing was scheduled on June 15, 2022 to address parts of the application being challenged. At the hearing, Banerjee told the tribunal she was withdrawing the application over the challenged changes.
She claimed that she had not received an email from Capsticks laying out the defendant’s position and a draft list of issues until just before the hearing commenced, per the Gazette. Banerjee did not oppose Capsticks’ application for wasted costs.
Banerjee alleged that she had raised her email issues to the Hunt and Coombs IT department. The department reportedly told her that the Mimecast security system was partially disabled on her Microsoft Outlook account, resulting in “number of emails…being caught but not notified to her that they were on hold,” per a statement published by the Gazette.
However, Hunt and Coombs said there was no record of Banerjee filing IT tickets or flagging her concern internally. While she had previously experienced issues with Mimecast, they had been addressed by August 2020.
Banerjee confessed to misleading the employment tribunal and to telling her client that the wasted costs order amounting to £2,597.64 was a result of “confusion” and that she would ask for it to be taken off the tribunal’s website, according to the Gazette. Moreover, she admitted that she agreed to a settlement offer on the client’s claim without the client’s knowledge or instructions.
In addition, she misled two other clients in other matters. She said in mitigation that she had told clients what they wanted to hear “simply to stop them from continuously emailing her,” per a snippet published by the Gazette.
The SDT panel said that Banerjee’s conduct “involved serious, deliberate, and repeated acts of dishonesty, misleading both clients and the employment tribunal over a period of time.” The decision was made to strike Banerjee from the roll and deny her anonymity.
