A senior partner who had sex on his desk with a more junior employee and told female staff what they should wear has been suspended for two years.
Jasvinder Singh Gill, a solicitor in his 40s at the time, admitted inappropriate sexual conduct involving three younger female colleagues where there was an inherent power imbalance.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal said Gill’s motivation was sexual and his conduct ‘placed the female employees who he had picked upon with the no doubt unsettling dilemma that rebuffing him would or could count against them in their continuing employment’.
Gill, whose firm name was not revealed in the tribunal judgment, admitted taking one colleague out for a pub lunch in 2015 and then requesting she come to his office before kissing her.
He told her in a private conversation that he preferred female employees to wear open toe shoes, stockings and not tights and short skirts, describing this as ‘proper office attire’.
In November 2019, before a work-related event in Bristol, he brought a younger colleague back to his hotel room, ordering a takeaway and offering her an alcoholic drink while they sat on the bed.
Between April 2019 and October 2020, he initiated a sexual relationship with a third colleague. The tribunal heard that he leant in and kissed her whilst in the office with the door closed, behaved in a flirtatious way in the office with physical touching, and on two occasions had sex with her on the desk. All these encounters were consensual.
Gill also told a fourth colleague there was a ‘preferred’ dress code of skirts rather than trousers and asked when she was going to wear a particular dress.
Gill had initially been due to face a full hearing before the tribunal but reviewed his position and made admissions which were acceptable to the SRA.
In agreeing to impose the suspension, the tribunal said it was not an ‘arbiter of morals and human frailty’ but acted to maintain the reputation of the profession and protect the public.
Gill, who qualified in 1999, was deemed to be an experienced and well-regarded solicitor who had built a thriving business, but who had acted towards more junior staff in a way which was ‘wrong and inappropriate’.
‘[His] conduct had not been a matter relating to his private life alone as it had been tied closely to his practise as a solicitor and in fact arose from within the work environment itself,’ said the tribunal. ‘[He] had, on repeated occasions, used his position of influence and authority in the workplace to create situations in which office relationships, sexual in intent, were initiated and pursued by him.’
Gill advanced several points of mitigation on health grounds, all of which were redacted.
As well as serving a 24-month suspension, he must provide medical reports with every application for a practising certificate. He also agreed to pay costs of £85,500.
