Lied to firm
A solicitor who earned substantial sums answering legal questions online while working for a law firm has been struck off after lying to his employer about the side hustle.
Matthew Moss worked as an employment solicitor at Optimal Solicitors from September 2019, mainly remotely from his home in Cheshire. From around 2021, however, he also began working as a “legal expert” for JustAnswer, a US-based website which allows members of the public to seek advice from professionals including lawyers.
Moss did not tell Optimal about the work or seek written permission, despite his employment contract requiring him to notify the firm of outside employment and obtain consent for work which might interfere with his duties or conflict with the firm’s interests.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) heard that the sums Moss received from JustAnswer were substantial.
Personal income and expenditure tables discovered by the firm showed payments from the platform totalling around £81,000 between October 2022 and June 2024, compared with earnings of around £45,000 from Optimal over the same period. The tribunal heard that banking screenshots suggested the JustAnswer income may have been higher still, with transactions between July 2023 and January 2024 showing payments totalling £39,103.25, compared with £29,765 recorded in the tables for that period.
Things came to light after Moss was informed in May 2024 that he was being made redundant. During his three-month notice period, the firm’s legal director became concerned about the “quality and quantity” of Moss’s work. Further enquiries revealed that Moss had sent a substantial number of emails from his work account to his personal email address, including documents showing payments from JustAnswer.
The firm subsequently suspended Moss and called him to a formal investigation meeting in June 2024.
When asked whether he was carrying out work for anyone else, Moss said he was “not yet” doing so and denied having worked for anyone else during the previous four years. Asked why JustAnswer was paying money into his account, he denied the money was for him and claimed that his brother worked for the platform and used his account to receive payment.
When asked what his brother did, Moss replied that he was “not at liberty to say”. He also confirmed that his only involvement with JustAnswer was accepting payments on somebody else’s behalf, but later admitted that these answers were untrue.
Moss told the SRA that he had been under “immense stress” during the meeting and that his mental state was “extremely fragile”. “When questioned about payments from JustAnswer, I panicked,” he said. “In a moment of severe anxiety, I falsely claimed that the payments were for work my brother had done, using my account. This was not true, and I deeply regret that I misled my employer in this way.”
Moss resigned from Optimal shortly after the meeting and his conduct was reported to the regulator later that month. In mitigation, he relied on psychiatric evidence which said he was likely to have been in an “extremely high state of anxiety” during the meeting, was psychologically overwhelmed and was focused on managing the situation in the moment.
The tribunal found that he had deliberately provided false information in response to legitimate questions from his employer and had attempted to conceal his involvement with JustAnswer through a series of untrue explanations. It said his behaviour represented a “significant departure from the standards of honesty, integrity and trustworthiness expected of a solicitor”.
The SDT concluded that the misconduct was “extremely serious” and that no sanction short of strike-off would be sufficient to protect the public and the reputation of the profession. Moss, who accepted strike-off as part of an agreed outcome with the SRA, was struck off the roll and ordered to pay costs of £5,759.
