The head of catastrophic injury claims at a law firm has been fined by the SRA after he forwarded a "grossly offensive" email.
Paul Breen was a PI department head at Liverpool firm Cassell Moore Law when he passed on the crude email to a colleague in August 2015. In its decision, the SRA said that Breen "inappropriately forwarded" the message "with content that was highly derogatory and grossly offensive towards women and persons of a particular religious group."
The SRA noted that Breen "was not the author of the email and did not expressly endorse the content" although he "forwarded it without condemnation". The SRA did not provide details in its decision as to exactly what was written in the email.
A bit of bantz. What could possibly go wrong?
Breen, who is not a solicitor, admitted to the SRA that he failed to carry out his role in the business "in a way that encourages equality of opportunity and respect for diversity." The SRA said that his conduct had potential to cause significant harm.
In mitigation, the SRA accepted that the views in the email did not reflect Breen's true character and beliefs, and that Breen had expressed remorse and was deeply ashamed of the email. The SRA said that the "nature of the misconduct was low" because Breen had "cooperated with the investigation" and there was "no pattern of misconduct".
Breen, who is now the head of catastrophic injury at JMW Solcitors in Manchester, was fined £1,600 by the SRA and agreed to pay £600 in costs. The fine was at the lower end of the scale compared with the regulator's penalty over this Bantersaurus Rex's email.
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What was the 'grossly offensive' content?
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Hopefully the person making the complaint was investigated to ensure that it was genuine and not malicious.
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it was a tasteless joke. He wasn’t the author. You can be criticised for forwarding a tasteless joke, I get that, but since when is it a matter for the regulator to “investigate”. I don’t know what religious group was the subject of the joke, but I am sure it was not christians. The woke virtue signallers would not have gone into overdrive about that, of course.
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So if I forward some clips or jokes from Monty Python Life of Brian, which is offensive to christians, will I be investigated? I doubt it.
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This happened in 2015??! What an absolute waste of our licence money.
It appears that (1) no one is allowed to be offended anymore and (2) if they do feel offended they’re incapable of standing up to it and having discourse to resolve it, so (3) they have to cry to someone to make it all better.
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I agree Dearie. Especially when you take into account some of the things that the SRA has not investigated even though they have been made aware of really bad behaviour (such as management of an MC firm who were caught doctoring appraisal records but who self certified there was "nothing to investigate" and shooed the SRA away).
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Yes, they seem to investigate things they shouldn't and not investigate things they should.
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The SRA Trustpilot reviews do not show them in a good light but I guess they have achieved the same standard as the Legal Ombudsman on Trustpilot; diabolical !
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why do solicitors take no action about a blatantly improper and corrupt regulator?