‘Panicked’
A solicitor who turned up half an hour late for a court hearing and then tried to cover his tracks with a fabricated attendance note has been struck off the roll.
Alexander David Edmund Hayes Gallagher, who qualified in 2016 and worked as a self-employed advocate instructed by LPC Law, was due at Wandsworth County Court at 2pm in August 2023. He arrived around 30 minutes late, having apparently convinced himself the hearing was listed for 3pm, by which point defence counsel had already left.
Rather than come clean, Gallagher sent an attendance note the following day claiming he had requested an adjournment due to a lack of instructions and that defence counsel had flagged issues around missing documents. Neither was true, a disciplinary tribunal found. He had not spoken to defence counsel at all.
LPC Law only became suspicious when its client received a copy of the court order, which told a rather different story about what had actually happened at the hearing.
When LPC Law confronted him on a recorded call — of which he was made aware — Gallagher fessed up. Gallagher fessed up. He had “panicked”, he said, and rather than fess up had simply “dressed up his mistake” in the attendance note. “I made up the attendance note, saying that I had requested an adjournment and that the court granted it,” he told the firm.
“I accept the deception is the worst part of it and I merely explain how this rather strange situation came about,” he added in a subsequent email. “It was pretty artless of me, I do not know why I did it.”
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal found that his conduct had been planned — he had deliberately decided to produce a false attendance note rather than simply hold his hands up to being late — and that his dishonesty had caused LPC Law “reputational damage with a longstanding client”.
The SDT acknowledged this was a single, brief episode in an otherwise unblemished career, and that Gallagher had made full and frank admissions to both LPC and the SRA. He did not, however, engage with the disciplinary proceedings or attend the hearing, and no formal mitigation was offered.
Striking him off the roll, the SDT said “members of the public would not expect a solicitor to lie in an attendance note of a hearing in order to cover his own embarrassment.”
Gallagher was also ordered to pay costs of £9,419.
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