Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal rules that all 12 allegations against solicitor-advocate for dishonesty and failing to comply with court orders are proven. Sanction is expected today
High-profile solicitor-advocate Soophia Khan (pictured above) faces the end of her legal career after she was found to have ‘dishonestly’ settled two former clients’ claims without their knowledge and later failed to cooperate with the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the legal ombudsman (LeO).
All 12 allegations against Khan – who was jailed for contempt of court in January – were found proven by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, which ruled that Khan acted dishonestly in settling her former clients’ damages and costs claims without telling them.
Khan, 42, was also found to have been dishonest in breaching an undertaking to London firm McMillan Williams, where she worked before leaving to set up her Leicester-based practice Sophie Khan & Co in 2013, by settling the costs claims without notifying them.
She 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 the production of documents and failed to hand over files in breach of two High Court orders, the SDT found.
Khan – who unsuccessfully applied to strike out 10 of the 12 allegations against her – has already suggested that she may seek to bring an appeal against the findings. She did not attend for most of the hearing, having filed an application for an adjournment at ‘quarter to midnight’ on Sunday, 31 July.
After the allegations against her were found proven, she appeared before the tribunal yesterday afternoon to seek more time to prepare submissions on the sanction that will be imposed and the SRA’s application for its costs, which were to be determined on the same day.
Contempt charge
The findings represent the latest chapter in Khan’s long-running row with the SRA, which intervened into Sophie Khan & Co almost a year ago and has since taken her to the High Court on several occasions.
In October 2021, 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. This resulted in Khan being jailed in HMP Bronzefield in Surrey, although the High Court refused the SRA’s application to summarily strike her off the roll.
Khan, a former chair of the Law Society Civil Justice Committee, mounted an unsuccessful appeal against her custodial sentence and also challenged the SRA’s intervention, which the High Court held was ‘necessary and proportionate for the protection of clients’.
The tribunal heard that Khan is ‘continuing to represent clients despite the suspension of her practising certificate’ and is ‘engaged in client work as matters stand in relation to people who have been transferred across to Just for Public … in order to evade the consequences of the intervention’.
Rupert Allen, for the SRA, told the SDT this week that Khan settled two former clients’ claims against police forces without the clients’ consent and ‘at a level lower than those clients had been led to believe their claims were worth’, which caused them both ‘significant prejudice’.
Faked documents
Allen also said Sophie Khan & Co settled 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, which Allen described as ‘misappropriation’.
Khan 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 or, alternatively, the court’.
Allen said that Khan’s failure to cooperate with the SRA and the 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’.
SDT chair Ashok Ghosh adjourned the question of sanctions and the SRA’s costs application until today, 5 August.
