The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) has struck off former Clyde & Co senior associate Rajpal Ahluwalia from the roll and ordered him to pay over £41,000 in costs after a series of failures starting in 2013, when he omitted to file a client’s defence.
The June judgment followed a 9-11 May hearing, at which Ahluwalia admitted failing to ensure that a client’s defence in 2013 was filed in good time, resulting in default judgment and £500,000 damages and costs.
The insurance litigator admitted that after default judgment was entered in May 2013, he failed to have it set aside until March 2014. Ahluwalia also failed to notify his client of two settlement offers from 2013.
The SDT partially found that the ex-Clydes solicitor signed a statement of truth in May 2013 on the defence, knowing that he had not seen the facts pleaded and had neither sought nor obtained the defendant’s authority to sign it.
Ahluwalia also made untrue statements in letters to a law firm and purported to send misleading emails to the insurer client and to a broker, breaching Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) principles, while failing to contact his client. He emailed an incorrect address, ensuring the client was not updated, the SRA found.
‘The defendant had cavalierly allowed the matter to go from bad to worse and in doing so had displayed that he lacked integrity,’ the tribunal noted.
Ahluwalia’s conduct on certain allegations was allegedly dishonest. As dishonesty, however, was inessential to the allegations, the tribunal did not need to find dishonesty.
Clydes suspended Ahluwalia, who resigned in November 2014. It reported the matter to the SRA.
This was the firm’s second run-in with the SDT this year, after being fined £50,000 in April, one of the largest fines for a law firm. Three Clydes partners also received individual £10,000 fines for breaching accounting and money laundering rules.
A Clydes’ spokesperson told Legal Business: ‘As a senior team member, Rajpal was responsible for setting an example to others and, like everyone at the firm, for upholding our code of conduct and client service standards.’
On 9 June, the SDT also cleared Leigh Day and three of its lawyers of professional misconduct charges relating to allegedly pursuing false damages claims of torture and murder of Iraqi civilians by British troops against the Ministry of Defence.
All 20 charges were dismissed against co-founder Martyn Day, partner Sapna Malik, solicitor Anna Crowther, and the firm.
The case, the longest-ever SDT prosecution, began after the closure of the £31m Al-Sweady public inquiry into allegations of unlawful killing of Iraqi nationals by British troops in Iraq in 2004.
tom.baker@legalease.oc.uk