(Post made at 1638 UK BST time on 13 Oct 2018 in a personal capacity.  Please see here for important background and disclosure of interests).

Hat tip to well known barrister Matthew Scott, who writes on Twitter under the handle @BarristerBlog (see here for the tweet and here for the related article)

“An innocent client who didn’t even want to make a PI claim, used by a dishonest solicitor and a couldn’t-care-less-as-long-as-I’m-paid doctor. Satisfyingly, the solicitor was caught because he was as incompetent as he was dishonest.”

I have mentioned before that dishonesty by solicitors is not tolerated by the regulator, the SRA.  In the above case, it appears that the dishonesty by a solicitor, Mr Kamar Abbas Khan, was exposed not by report to the regulator but in the High Court.  The solicitor was found guilty of contempt of court by Mr Justice Garnham, who described him as a “thoroughly dishonest man” and jailed him for 15 months (see here).

Dishonesty by a solicitor almost invariably leads to striking off

Mr Khan is no longer on the roll of solicitors.  But it is seems certain that (even apart from his criminal conviction) had he remained on the roll, the SRA would have struck him off:

From the SRA website (see here):

dishonesty by a solicitor almost invariably leads to striking off.

The above case was for a practising solicitor. The penalty for any dishonesty by a non-practising solicitor is likely to be lower, but from the above quote from the SRA website appears still likely to lead to striking off.

Update at 1704 BST 13 Oct 2018

It appears that Mr Khan was struck off for a minimum of 5 years in March 2017 by an SDT (Solicitors’ Disciplinary Tribunal), ostensibly for other matters (including breaches of Accounts and Money Laundering rules): see here.