It has been revealed that a former Herbert Smith Freehills lawyer dodged £23,000 of train fares - and ran away when he was caught.

From April 2012 until late last year Australian lawyer Peter Barnett commuted from his home in Oxfordshire to London without a ticket, tapping out of Marylebone station with his Oyster card. As a result he avoided paying £19.80 a day, the cost of a peak single fare, and paid the £7.60 charge for an incomplete Oyster journey instead. That's a handy saving of £12.20 a day.

  An Artful Dodger with his Oyster card yesterday  

When Barnett was stopped by a ticket inspector last November he lied and said that he had come from Wembley. And when a staff member became suspicious and turned his back to find his supervisor, Barnett ran away. However he returned and confessed the next day, kickstarting an investigation by TfL which estimated that the lawyer dodged more than £23,000 in fares. Barnett pleaded guilty to six counts of fraud at Westminster Magistrates Court and could be sentenced to two years in prison.

Barnett is an unlikely dodger. He used to work as a solicitor-advocate at Herbert Smith Freehills, is a Rhodes Scholar, founded a charity for African children and wrote a book on international law (yours for £99 or, with your Oyster card, £7.60). Even more surprisingly, he had continued with his illegal austerity drive despite having been caught doing the same thing in 2010.

Herbert Smith declined to comment on its ex-employee.
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Comments

Anonymous 27 March 15 08:14

Is it just me or is the legal profession becoming more dishonest? (esp. when considering the Gibson Dunn fiasco also). Never seems to be a week that passes without a serious case of lawyer dishonesty. And of course, these are only the ones that are both uncovered and also reach the media.
Is it due to greater levels of mental illness in the profession? Or is the money attracting less and less ethical characters into the law than before? Or a combination of both?

Anonymous 27 March 15 10:30

In answer to anon at 8:14, I don't think it's to do with less ethical characters joining the ranks. Are professional standards for solicitors slipping? Again, no, I don't think so but there are masses more "lawyers" out there. Some might be good but many others (even in supposedly respectable firms) I wouldn't trust as far as far as I could throw.

Anonymous 27 March 15 11:15

In answer to the above, the answer can be found within the article. "Australian lawyer" contains a vital clue here.

Anonymous 27 March 15 12:43

Pretty stinky chat from annonymous at 11.15. Peter Barnett is a calculated thief and a twerp but being Aussie has nothing to do with it.

ROF - on the subject of his savings, if £19.80 was the single fare, how did he get home?

Anonymous 27 March 15 14:33

In answer to anon 8:14 and 10:30 - or, could it be a classic case of lawyers buckling under the ridiculous pressure placed upon them by their superiors? (Leading, therefore, to a degree of mental illness)

Anonymous 28 March 15 03:52

Could someone please explain the supposed correlation between mental illness and dishonesty? I'm struggling to see it myself.

Anonymous 30 March 15 11:49

anon 0.3.52 - re. mental illness and crime.

Yes, it's an interesting area for discussion. Why does a person who knows something is 'criminal' commit such an act? Why does reason and intelligence and wisdom and all the other rational parts of the person vanish and the desire to just do something bad take over, especially when they must also know that their act could put them in prison and at the least ruin their careers? Yet they still feel compelled by desire to do it.

Mental illness does not have to lead to crime, but one has to ask what was happening in these people's internal and emotional lives that led them to make such a leap from law abiding to taking a massive risk and committing a criminal act. I don't think what they did was a simple case of cold, hard risk assessment, it was more than that. These are people for whom societal boundaries have collapsed, they live in a world of their own making, perhaps like investment bankers who still cannot see what is wrong with massive risk taking that could stuff the global financial system - they just want and need to do it. They feel driven to do it.

It's perhaps also worth considering how many people in prison suffer from mental illness (and were that way before they went to prison). Hmm, a big topic and not enough room here to explore. But, perhaps one for RoF to do a special on?