By James Simons-
A solicitor who inflated charges to clients on several estates and went as far as occupying a property intended to benefit one of them has been struck off from the legal profession.
Joanne Power, sole principal at Essex firm Diamonds Legal owner was also fined £46,000 in costs. Power accepted her professional standards may have fallen short of what was expected and apologized. She denied that any acts, omissions or failings on her part were made with dishonest intent.
The tribunal were unconvinced of her defense, they have heard it too many times before. Offending solicitors and barristers may be able to use their brains and words to tun cases around or nail cases, but those skills don’t work with the Solicitors Regulation Authority. They know the codes and conducts expected of solicitors, and don’t let them escape when the violate them.
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Power also delayed a £95,000 payment to beneficiaries by almost three years. He also asked the mother of beneficiaries to withhold information from others about their entitlements.Power was admitted to the roll in 2002, insisted she did not deliberately hide charges from clients or mislead them about costs. She said in hindsight she had began to ‘blur the lines’ between what was properly chargeable as legal work and what was not.
However, the tribunal concluded that she had acted without integrity, describing her misconduct as ‘deliberate, calculated and repeated’. The tribunal further concluded that in Powells’ absence that SRA investigators had found one client matter where work valued at £30,000 was undertaken with over £250,000 transferred from client to office account in bills over a six period. The only evidence of costs information provided to the estate was a handwritten costs estimate of £200,000 over a 10-year period.
Investigators discovered that transfers appeared to have enabled the firm to pay office expenses: in January 2015, for example, there was a client to office transfer of £20,000 which enabled a payment of £14,843 to HM Revenue & Customs. Lawyers for Power admitted in a letter dated August 2017 that financial records made for ‘embarrassing reading’.
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Power said sum of her earnings were unrelated to her legal work and included an ‘element of uplift’ to her hourly rates. Power purchased a residential property in Loughton, three miles from her office, using the assets of the estate of a client. The tribunal heard evidence that occupation of the property continued over two years, on various dates, for her personal use before she rented it out.
The evidence against Power was so much that her excuses were empty and without force.Power said the occasional occupation of the premises was a necessary function of the provision of services to the estate. The tribunal held that she had ‘exploited’ her professional role as a solicitor. She truly had, and there was no way she could reverse that fact.
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