ROF
A solicitor suspended from practice for a year for tricking an 82-year-old farmer has published a column bemoaning the state of ethics in the legal profession.
In an opinion piece headed “Ethics 101” which appeared in the Law Gazette, former Wright Hassell solicitor Joel Woolf announced that he was “heartened that ethics is to come back to the top of the regulatory agenda”.
“I am dismayed that there is no explanation as to why in recent years ethics has apparently fallen such as to need re-elevation.”
Mourning the drop in regulatory standards, he said, “Ethics in legal practice has to be taught and taught hard. It is not an easy subject”.
Woolf would know. He recently served a year’s suspension from practice after admitting multiple breaches of the SRA Principles, although he was too coy to mention his lived experience in his column.
While acting for a landlord in 2020, Woolf sent an 82-year-old tenant farmer three notices to quit agricultural land.
All three notices were designed to look the same, but in fact each notice referred to a different ground on which possession was sought. Woolf sent notices 1 and 2 by first class mail and then sent notices 2 and 3 by special delivery.
The tenant’s son mistakenly thought the notices sent by first class post were duplicates of the notices sent by special delivery, so only sent one set to his father’s solicitors.
Unaware of notice 3, the farmer’s lawyers missed the deadline to serve a counter notice.
Formulating the scheme, Woolf had advised the landlord, “I am still working out how best to try and disguise the fact of the bare notice to quit. It might be that I serve 2 notices in each letter in order to try and not make it obvious that one of the notices is a bare notice to quit. This is in order to try and spoof the tenant’s advisers into just having the notices delivered by special delivery referred to arbitration and not notice that one of the notices is different.”
Woolf, who now runs his own rural consultancy business, was aware that he was dealing with a vulnerable person: “Given the current COVID situation, I should just warn you to watch out for any notice arriving informing you of the death of the tenant. The tenant is clearly quite old being at least in his 70s”, he told his client.
After the scheme was successful, Woolf noted that his “ruse” was a practice which “was considered sharp”.
Ultimately the farmer was able to continue to occupy the holding, but Woolf’s actions “caused considerable stress and anxiety” to the family, impacting on their ability to run their farming business effectively, and requiring them to engage in civil court proceedings and pay legal fees, said the SRA.
Although Woolf admitted to the tribunal that he had acted without integrity, the panel agreed that he had not been dishonest.
The SDT said that as Woolf “genuinely believed” when he cooked up the “trick” that he was “merely acting in accordance with established custom and standard practice in his field of agricultural law”, he had not acted dishonestly. Its reasoning appears to have astonished Professor Richard Moorhead, a legal ethics expert.
“Should the professional disciplinary tribunal require more independence of thought than ‘it’s a common tactic so it must be okay’?” he asked.
Woolf’s tub-thumping column was critical of the regulatory regime for a different reason. He said it had moved “from a system where we were judged in the moment to one where we are judged in retrospect”.
Modestly choosing to illustrate his argument with a speeding analogy rather than his own case, Woolf wrote that “Sometimes ethical problems hit you full frontal; more often they sidle up behind you in the shadows”.
ROF asked Woolf whether devising “a plan to deliberately mislead an elderly Tenant”, as the SRA described it, was an ethical problem that hit him full frontal, or sidled up behind him in the shadows. Woolf, whose ban ended last February, declined to comment.
