A solicitor has been struck off after fabricating five client letters and trying to pass them off to the regulator as genuine.
Sussex practitioner David Crosby, admitted in 1997, provided investigators with the letters purportedly from several years before and sent to a client. But various inconsistencies were found which strongly suggested they were not genuine.
A file review memo purportedly by a colleague was also handed over to the Solicitors Regulation Authority by Crosby which was suspected to be false.
Following a one-day hearing at the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal last month, which Crosby did not attend, it was found that he fabricated the letters and the file review note to make it seem like he was not the fee earner handling the case.
‘Mr Crosby was motivated by his desire to avoid regulatory sanction, which was the reason for his dishonesty about his role in acting for Client A,’ said the tribunal. ‘Further, he was motivated by financial gain. His actions were planned. He had fabricated documents to support his contentions.’
Crosby, a partner at Sussex firm Crosby & Woods, was reported to the SRA by another firm on behalf of the executors of an estate. He was found to have caused a cash shortage of £39,660, most of which was still unrectified, by making transfers for costs from the firm’s client account to the office account. Crosby also caused a potential extra cash shortage of £14,520 on a personal injury trust matter, which prompted him to fabricate the letters to suggest that was caused by another fee earner.
Crosby also misled his firm’s professional indemnity insurer about the part-time status of a colleague and about the firm’s financial position, before the SRA shut down the practice in 2021.
Crosby had agreed for proceedings to go ahead in his absence, saying he did not propose to enter detailed correspondence on the matter and did not see any useful purpose from taking part.
The tribunal said Crosby caused financial and emotional harm to his clients and that harm was wholly foreseeable. It was only due to the SRA investigation that some clients discovered the impact of his misconduct on themselves, and the damage he caused to the reputation of the profession was ‘significant’.
Crosby was struck off the roll and ordered to pay £26,595 costs. The SRA had applied for £38,355 costs but the tribunal deemed this figure neither reasonable nor proportionate. The hourly claimed-for rate of £335 was pared down to £200.
