AAL Muppet of the Week: Young solicitor struck off

Mar 31, 2016

Written By Jack J Collins, Editor, AllAboutLaw.co.uk

You’ve guessed it – it’s fabricating documents again. Will these solicitors never learn?

Laura Catherine Holloway, a young solicitor at international firm DLA Piper, has been struck off the solicitor’s register after failing to appear at her hearing this week.

The issue begins in October 2013, when Holloway, 28, was called into a meeting at the firm’s offices in Sheffield, with her supervising solicitor and an HR director, who had been contacted by her client.

Rather than admitting the case had been struck out by the county court due to an unpaid fee, Holloway assured her seniors that the application for reinstatement had been made, and then, after a short break, presented the documents – two letters and a reinstatement application.

However, following further client pressure, an internal investigation showed that the court simply had not received any documents of the sort. Holloway then admitted the letters were fake, and that she had been dishonest, and was dismissed immediately.

Following this, and a failed appeal, the case was referred to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), who charged her with four allegations, which included fabrication of court documents and misleading her employer.

This week, she failed to appear at her hearing, and was thus struck off the roll of solicitors and ordered to pay £5,900 in costs.

Andrew Bullock, an SRA representative, stated that Miss Holloway was: “deliberately concealing from her employer the fact that the claim had been struck out and she had failed to rectify the situation.

“Even as a young and comparatively inexperienced solicitor working in the no doubt pressured environment of the real estate litigation team of a major law firm, she must have realised that doing that was wrong.”

Miss Holloway has 21 days in which to appeal her case before the SRA.

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