Two solicitors have been struck from the roll and ordered to pay combined costs of £89,000, after the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal found a series of allegations related to conveyancing transactions were of the “utmost seriousness” and a “fundamental breach” of trust.
In separate and unrelated hearings, Julian Condliffe and Fiona Jane Smith were ordered to pay costs of £48,000 and £41,000 respectively, after the tribunal found allegations brought by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, including multiple breaches of client account rules, to be proved.
In a decision published in August, the tribunal heard how Smith, co-founder, co-owner and COFA of MSP Legal Services LLP, a Hartlepool firm whose main income was from conveyancing, had improperly transferred a “vast sum” of client money to the firm’s office account which had subsequently been “dissipated”.
A forensic investigation by the SRA identified shortages of over £16,000 in October 2021, £600,000 in December 2022 and £638,000 in February 2023.
The tribunal heard that Smith, along with her husband and co-founder of the firm Andrew Jones, who was also the firm’s COLP, also took total net drawings of almost £200,000 from the firm’s office account in the year before the SRA’s intervention.
“The respondent derived a personal financial benefit from her misconduct”, the tribunal noted in its decision.
“The respondent’s misconduct is a fundamental breach of considerable trust. The firm’s practice was centred on conveyancing, a particularly highly regulated area of legal practice given it primarily concerns the crucial responsibility of managing client money.”
By December 2024, 23 successful claims to the SRA’s compensation fund made by clients of the firm showed a failure to account for at least £983,000 of client money.
“Whilst [the compensation fund] used most of the money recovered from the firm as part of the intervention in the sum of £532,840.02 to partly pay those claims, the fund has had to make up the shortfall of at least £450,943.19 to ensure clients’ losses were put right”, the tribunal noted.
“It follows that the respondent’s misconduct has caused significant financial harm to the legal profession in the form of the costs to the fund.”
Smith, who was admitted as a solicitor in 2000, was struck from the roll, with the tribunal finding that the “seriousness of her conduct, and the level of harm she has caused, is such that a lesser sanction would be entirely inappropriate”.
Julian Condliffe, who was admitted in 2012, was also struck from the roll after the tribunal heard she had misled three “vulnerable” individuals who believed they were purchasing a residential property they had paid for but was never transferred into their names.
She was further found to have failed to “promptly” return client monies related to conveyancing transactions due to the improper use of the Tide financial platform as a client account. Although the platform’s own terms explicitly exclude businesses which hold or control client funds, Condliffe allowed client balances to reach £2.575 million.
Condliffe did not dispute the breaches and said she was “proud” of using the account to receive and pay client monies, primarily in respect of conveyancing transactions, despite Tide imposing financial limits of £1 million for incoming payments and £250,000 per day for outgoing payments.
The resulting delays in returning or discharging funds “caused direct and serious harm to at least one client”, the tribunal heard, who was left “in significant distress” when completion monies of £1.1 million could not be returned for 23 days following an aborted transaction.
The tribunal also heard how in 2018, in her capacity as sole director of private property investment company PPW, Condliffe acted for three individuals, all of whom were described as “nurses and friends” in the purchase of a residential property.
The investors understood they would be purchasing the freehold property in the usual way and that it would be transferred into their names. In 2019, one of the investors raised concerns that the property had not been transferred and was owned by PPW.
Condliffe denied misleading the investors and acting dishonestly, relying on the proposition that the individuals had entered into a common-law management tenancy with an option to purchase, whereas the individuals were in fact led to believe that they were purchasing the freehold property outright, following payment of completion monies and a sourcing fee, and signing the transfer form TR1.
In mitigation, the tribunal heard Condliffe had claimed: “This was not an ordinary house purchase; the Investors were not buying a home to live in, instead this was a creative solution to meet the Investors’ wish to make money through investment in property”, and that the “hallmarks of a regular conveyancing transaction were absent – no client care letter, no conveyancing fee, no report on title and no searches.”
Although Condliffe accepted that the TR1 and AP1 forms she had prepared for the investors had been signed, she maintained the TR1 had been “held in escrow, as a form of security, and not in expectation of an immediate transfer taking place”.
Rejecting Condliffe’s claims, the tribunal determined “that as well as not receiving a completed title transfer, the Investors received no independent legal advice, no signed documentation or any clear contractual framework, and no land registry protection because no notice or restriction was registered against the title. Instead, there was reliance on a TR1 unsigned by the seller and allegedly held in escrow and an ID1 land registry form. They were a vulnerable client group left entirely unprotected, with no means of knowing that title had not been transferred until [one of the investors] carried out his own title search, in or around February 2019.”
In assessing culpability, the tribunal found Condliffe’s “dishonest actions” in relation to the investors were planned and she had acted in breach of the trust placed in her as both a solicitor and property investor.
“She had misled the Investors deliberately and repeatedly over a significant period of time and that had extended into misleading the regulator and the court”, the tribunal found.
“She had taken advantage of vulnerable people by claiming that the title to the Property they had purchased would be registered in their names without taking any steps to do so.”
Finding the misconduct to be “of the utmost seriousness”, the tribunal ordered Condliffe to be struck from the roll and pay costs of £47,939.
