Solicitors’ and Doctors’ Regulators Protecting the Public
Recent cases of misconduct involving solicitors and doctors illustrate the dilemmas facing Regulators who have the overriding duty of protecting the public, and the lengths to which they should go to achieve that goal.
Last year a partner in a major UK law firm was fined £35,000 together with £200,000 costs after the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal found that he had failed to act with integrity and brought the profession into disrepute. It ruled that he had engaged in sexual activity with a junior female colleague and knew or ought to have know that the complainant was intoxicated to the extent that her judgement was impaired.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) initially expressed surprise at the penalty but decided not to appeal.
More recently, a solicitor partner of another City firm, found to have committed serious professional misconduct was fined £55,000 and ordered to pay £40,000 costs. The case against him was that he had propositioned a junior associate in a hotel room following a social event, and that he had attempted to interfere in an internal investigation.
It appears that there may be further cases in the pipeline. Without a ruling from a higher authority, it is presently difficult to know where the benchmark is for misconduct of this sort in the solicitors’ branch of the legal profession.
Faced with two such perplexing cases, the General Medical Council (GMC) appealed decisions of the Medical Practitioners Appeals Tribunal to the Administrative Court without success. In the case of General Medical Council v X [2019] EWHC 493 (Admin) Soole J rejected the GMC’s appeal against a sanction of 12 months’ suspension with a review. The doctor’s misconduct arose out of an online conversation of a sexual nature with someone he believed was aged 15, although he was in fact speaking to a member of a paedophile vigilante group. Thereafter he repeatedly lied to the police and employing Trust by claiming a therapeutic motive for continuing the conversation.
The case of General Medical Council v Awan [2020] EWHC 1553 (Admin) was strikingly similar. In this case, too, the doctor had been involved in online conversations with someone he believed to be a child (in this case aged 13) when in fact he was speaking to a police officer. On appeal, Mostyn J declined to hold that suspension of 9 months with a review was wrong.
If a solicitor is found to be dishonest the inevitable outcome is striking off and there is no way back. The situation appears at present to be less clear when it comes to sexual misconduct, although there will undoubtedly be a line which is somewhere (as yet undefined) that cannot be crossed without a similar outcome.
Where a doctor is found to have been dishonest the line is blurred. It will always be a question of fact and degree but it does not follow inevitably that because there is dishonesty the doctor will lose his ability to practise medicine. Some may think, though, that where the doctor’s misconduct involves a sexual element, or a proclivity for engaging in online sexual chat with children or other sexual misconduct, his livelihood should be in peril.
There is much room for argument in all these cases, and they each cry out for decisions from the Court of Appeal. No-one wants to use the services of a dishonest solicitor. Likewise, how many would seek the services of a doctor (particularly for their offspring) if they knew he had been indulging in online sexual chat he believed to be with children?