‘Sad case’
A junior solicitor who fabricated 100 hours of time across four client matters while struggling to meet her billing targets has been struck off, despite the tribunal expressing sympathy for the pressures she faced.
Clare Elizabeth Forster, who qualified in 2019 and was working as a clinical negligence solicitor at national firm Hudgell Solicitors, admitted acting dishonestly but argued that exceptional circumstances should spare her from the profession’s ultimate sanction.
Forster joined Hudgells in March 2022 with a billing target of 125 chargeable hours per month. Between November 2022 and April 2023, she was averaging just 87.7 hours a month, roughly 30% below target, though she was regularly working late into the evening in an attempt to keep up.
The firm responded supportively, according to the public ruling, pausing new case allocations to let her focus on her existing caseload and temporarily reducing her target to 100 hours. A performance improvement plan followed in August 2023. But after a period of sick leave that autumn, things got worse rather than better.
Between June and November 2023, Forster recorded time on work that had never been done. In one instance, she logged 43 units on a client matter that she later admitted had not been carried out, initially blaming an IT failure for the missing file note. In another, an attendance note claimed to document 55 units of work but contained only a date and file reference number. A further 16 hours were recorded against three documents that had not been touched.
When challenged over blank documents she had nonetheless billed time against, Forster admitted she had recorded hours for work she had intended to do later, putting her conduct down to the relentless pressure of hitting her targets.
The tribunal heard how significant personal challenges had taken a serious toll on her mental health and her ability to function in the workplace. It was also submitted that her pattern of late-night time recording should have been a “red flag” to the firm that something was seriously wrong.
The tribunal acknowledged all of this. It described the case as “sad” and accepted there was “substantial mitigation” in the form of her mental health difficulties, personal circumstances and workplace pressure. It also accepted she had acted against her normal character and shown genuine remorse.
But it drew the line at striking off being disproportionate. The dishonesty had not been a single lapse. It had played out over five months, spanned multiple client matters and involved deliberate concealment, including a false explanation blaming IT for a missing file note.The tribunal concluded that while Forster’s mental health had fluctuated, it had not degraded her capacity to distinguish right from wrong.
Forster was struck off and ordered to pay costs of £25,000.
The tribunal took the opportunity to remind solicitors that they “bore a professional responsibility to seek assistance before actions spiralled into serious misconduct.”
I do think it’s crazy that the way we assess series misconduct in the legal profession is through inflating billable hours… as if there isn’t anything else problematic! Being a solicitor really isn’t worth it.
You think it’s crazy that we consider fraud to be misconduct?
I mean as a society (and within professional services) we tend to shift the goal posts of what we consider misconduct. I don’t think unreasonably inflating your hours is the best conduct, but I also don’t think inflating is that serious. And it doesn’t make sense to me to continuously punish the solicitor. They obviously inflate their time for a reason due to excessive pressure. So regulators and policy makers need to focus their attention on rooting out the real issue if they want the public to have trust in the profession. Solicitors know it’s misconduct and “serious” but the pressure they face is also serious.
Billing the client for work that hasn’t been done is fraud. It is a criminal offence, let alone a dishonest offence. Dishonesty has always been the number one sanctionable offence.
I’d argue that your interpretation that “the way we assess [serious] misconduct in the legal profession is through inflating billable hours” instead reflects the frequency of billable hour fraud, rather than an attempt by the SRA to over-zealously investigate these offences over others.
Indeed. There will be a root cause in the frequency of inflating billable hours. That’s the point. That’s what the SRA doesn’t seem to concern itself with through its regulatory policy making functions. Nor does Government seem to give thought to this. They ought to if they want to solve the problem. It is not wrong for the SRA to investigate these issues, but they need to do just that. And similarly for the SDT it should of course sanction solicitors, but it should do so proportionately.
This is one symptom of the glamorisation of a legal career and what it is to be a solicitor. It’s a tough profession and most people really aren’t cut out for it and sadly become the victim to a rotten profession.
This is common among city (especially US) firms. Just look at the comments of the judge regarding Hogan Lovell’s billing in the recent Gambling Commission case. If she was a partner destroying evidence she would’ve got a suspension.
My only comment is why do the SDT (and indeed the BSB) impose cost consequences? Why did it cost the SRA £25,000 to bring this case? Other regulatory bodies like the GMC and NMC don’t do this, they absorb the cost of instructing counsel etc. Being struck off is punishment enough.
Indeed. Stinks really! The SDT is a cash cow for the SRA.
She wanted both her salary and her soul.
What are these billing targets and hours ? Explain.
I don’t know the facts of this case but here is a general observation. When the young join law firms they are basically joining a cult. They are told this is a great opportunity and that they must be grateful for the chance to damage their health by working extremely long hours in order to please demanding clients and to hit extreme billing targets. Then the partners and managers start turning up the pressure on them. I think most western management training these days is how to apply psychological pressure on your employees. So the juniors try really hard to meet the targets. They put themselves under a lot of stress and they don’t take a step back and think this job is rubbish what the hell am I doing here?
IMO the root of the problem is that there is just not enough profit in the game. So you have to take on lots of files. But files are never simple. There are always problems that you cannot bill for. They always take more time than the client is willing to pay for. The aml and other regulatory procedures add to the pressures as they take a lot of time and rightly clients would not want to pay for it. If you have lots of files and lots of paperwork you are not going to be able to speak to all your clients as much as they wish.
So imo management at the firms know the targets are unrealistic or extremely tough. But either they are greedy or the law is no longer profitable, and they are forced to whip naïve juniors in order to keep the firm afloat.
So my advice to juniors is to know when to walk away. It is much better to impolitely tell management to go away or to quit the job, or indeed to knowingly doss, than to continue to try to please them.
In the vast majority of cases they do not care about you. Notice how they put her on a performance plan in august and the story implies they were made aware of the problem in April. And yet the tribunal claims the firms was supportive – lol. I do not know the ins and outs of this particular case but a lot of firms do this to a lot of people. Wait for a seemly period (probably connected with employment law) to expire and then put you on the plan. But they always intended to put you on the plan. Many firms also seem to happily report their employees to the sra. Sometimes I think this is vindictiveness. Sometimes they are scared that they “have to” report. I also speculate that they do not have to pay you notice pay if it is gross misconduct and some firms really are that greedy, and don’t care that your career is ruined.
The firms want hard working sycophants. The best of them will be kept and worked. Those who don’t work very hard will be forced out at some point. However they will still have the ability to work. It’s those in the middle who take dangerous risks trying to please their masters who put their careers in jeopardy.
Quality drafting indeed. Hard agree on the incentives and how the system works.
Whether there is “just not enough profit in the game” is IMO debatable. It’s at least partly due to distribution / inequality (compare partner profits’ inflation over time to associate salaries and general inflation over the same period). So greed at the top leaves everyone further fown progressively worse off and subject to career-threatening (and in some cases life-threatening) pressures.
Solutions include growing a pair and aggressive (but lawful) pursuit of financial independence. The system won’t change meaningfully, because human nature doesn’t.
I hope they wore their balaclavas when demanding a fee like that.
The article touches on the solicitors mental health struggles which lead to the decisions that were made as if the SDT wanted to show some sort of sympathy but couldn’t accept it as exceptional circumstances as there was a pattern and it wasn’t a one off bad decision. Unfortunately this just proves that they do not recognise how mental health impacts people. But hey, they described the case as ‘sad’ so that shows that they care.
The case looks like a witch hunt which I am sure has taken its toll on the people involved. It would be nice to read what measures the firm took to support the struggling solicitor although I can probably guess why this has been left out.