By Samantha Jones-
Former prominent solicitor, Soophia Khan has been struck off the roll for ‘dishonestly’ , aftersettling two former clients’ claims without their knowledge and later failing to cooperate with the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the legal ombudsman (LeO).
Khan was also ordered to pay the Solicitor Regulator Authority (SRA) costs in the sum of £109,681.82.
Khan(pictured) had initially tried to adjourn the hearing after putting in a last minute application in the 11th hour to change the date, but the solicitors disciplinary tribunal rejected her attempt to delay the hearing.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal found Khan to have been dishonest in breaching an undertaking to London firm McMillan Williams, where she worked before leaving to set up Leicester-based practice Sophie Khan & Co in 2013, by settling the costs claims without notifying them.
The former prominent solicitor also failed to cooperate with the SRA and the LeO in relation to complaints made by a third former client, failed to comply with a court order obtained by the SRA for production of documents and failed to hand over files in breach of two High Court orders, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal(SDT) found.
Her Leicester-based firm was closed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) in August 2021 and she was suspended from practising while it investigated her for allegations of dishonesty. She was eventually jailed for contempt of court after she refused to surrender her files to the SRA.
She then repeatedly refused to do so despite two court orders and a warrant being issued for her arrest.
Mr Justice Leech has now given her a six-month sentence for contempt of court for breaching the two court orders
Khan, a former chair of the Law Society Civil Justice Committee, had her application for a rehearing declined, and urged the SDT not to strike her off the roll.
Representing herself, she claimed there had been ‘no harm or prejudice’ to her former clients or McMillan Williams.
Khan said immediately after the sanction was announced: ‘I will be appealing the decision.’ She has an automatic right to appeal against the SDT’s findings at the High Court.
The tribunal heard this week that Khan had settled two former clients’ claims against the police without their consent and ‘at a level lower than those clients had been led to believe their claims were worth’.
Rupert Allen, for the SRA, said Sophie Khan & Co settled the subsequent costs claims ‘in breach of an undertaking’ to McMillan Williams, which had a ‘significant amount of work in progress on the case’, before Khan paid a £100,000 cheque directly into her firm’s office account.
She also ‘fabricated certain documents which purport to show contemporaneous notification of the costs [claimed by Sophie Khan & Co] to the clients’, Allen told the tribunal, adding that ‘these were produced in order to mislead the SRA’.
Allen said that Khan’s failure to cooperate with the SRA and LeO was a ‘deliberate or knowing or conscious breach of her regulatory obligations’, which was not dishonest but was ‘potentially on a par with dishonesty’.
In October, the regulator sought to gain access to the firm’s files and in November obtained an injunction to prevent her from ‘unlawfully’ acting as a lawyer through a charity called Just for Public.
A warrant was issued for her arrest that month after she failed to attend court to answer allegations of contempt, which were found proved and saw Khan jailed in HMP Bronzefield in Surrey.
With her striking off, her reputation is now in tartars, and a woman once held in high esteem nationally and amongst lawyers, finds herself picking up the pieces of her dishonest act.