Dentons is under SRA investigation after a cover-up by its HR team unravelled during a discrimination case which it lost.

Last year an Employment Tribunal found Dentons guilty of discriminating against, and unfairly dismissing, recruitment manager Bina Hale because she was on maternity leave. During the hearing, it emerged that when Dentons learned that Hale was going to sue, HR manager Suzanne Barnes replaced her handwritten notes of crucial meetings with typed versions. "One has to ask oneself, why would she do that?" said the tribunal. "Was she hiding something?"

Emma Rowe, Dentons' UK head of HR, produced what she claimed were contemporaneous notes or a critical meeting. However they were written on white paper, not the brown-tinted paper used in her Dentons notebooks. The date of the meeting was wrong and, "extraordinarily", said the tribunal, mirrored the incorrect date from Barnes' record. "None of this is credible", found the tribunal, which decided that Rowe actually created her note retrospectively.

And then they burnt the corners, dipped it in tea and put it on the boiler overnight.

The Dentons partner in charge of Bale's office was also criticised. Andrew Harris' attempts to walk back positive comments he made about Hale's performance were judged "unconvincing and lacking in credibility". In a crushing judgment, the tribunal said that Dentons' witnesses demonstrated a "lack of honesty", and that neither Rowe nor Barnes were credible witnesses. 

So now the SRA is having a sniff. A Dentons spokesman said that after the tribunal's decision, the firm notified the SRA that it was conducting an internal investigation and has given the regulator a copy of its findings. He said the firm was now "working with the SRA" on its own inquiry, and expected the results to be published within the next few weeks. A spokesman for the SRA said, "We will gather all relevant information and decide on any next steps”.