Soophia Khan has been struck off for ‘dishonestly’ settling two former clients’ claims without their knowledge and later failing to cooperate with the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the legal ombudsman (LeO).
All 12 allegations against the high-profile solicitor-advocate – 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 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 production of documents and failed to hand over files in breach of two High Court orders, the SDT found.
Khan, a former chair of the Law Society Civil Justice Committee, today applied for a rehearing – which was refused – and urged the SDT not to strike her off the roll, arguing that there had been ‘no harm or prejudice’ to her former clients or McMillan Williams.
But tribunal chair Ashok Ghosh said: ‘The tribunal orders that the respondent Soophia Khan, solicitor, be struck off the roll of solicitors.’ Khan was also ordered to pay the SRA’s costs in the sum of £109,681.82.
Khan said immediately after the sanction was announced: ‘I will be appealing the decision.’ She has an automatic right to appeal against the SDT's findings at the High Court.
The tribunal heard this week that Khan had settled two former clients’ claims against the police without their consent and ‘at a level lower than those clients had been led to believe their claims were worth’.
Rupert Allen, for the SRA, said Sophie Khan & Co settled the 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.
She 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’.
Allen said that Khan’s failure to cooperate with the SRA and 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’.
Today's decision represents 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, 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 and saw Khan jailed in HMP Bronzefield in Surrey.
Khan 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’.
