Niranjana Patel

Findings — machine-extracted (anthropic-batch:claude-opus-4-8); verify against the decision

The Tribunal found that on 29 January 2021, while an associate solicitor at Jackson Lees Group Limited, the Respondent created a letter to client K's landlord (based on an existing 9 April 2020 letter) at 11:08hrs and backdated it to 12 January 2021 to make it appear she had progressed the case when she had not, after receiving chaser emails from the Firm's head of risk and compliance. She told a colleague and the client the letter had been sent on 12 January 2021. The Tribunal rejected her account that she had merely 'looked at' an already-dictated letter and accepted the IT director's evidence that she created and manually altered the date of the document. It found breaches of Principles 2, 4 and 5 and paragraph 1.4 of the Code, and made an express finding of dishonesty under the Ivey test. Given exceptional circumstances (isolated, momentary, unplanned conduct, exemplary history, personal pressures), the Tribunal imposed a 12-month suspension, itself suspended for two years, rather than strike-off.

Duties found breached:

• Good faith and courtesy to colleagues
• Honesty
• Integrity
• Uphold public trust in the profession

Mitigating factors:

• Unblemished and exemplary professional and regulatory history with no previous disciplinary findings
• Qualified 15 years and managing three departments at the relevant time
• Struggling with high volume of work and had a very challenging schedule the day before the misconduct
• Feeling unwell (migraines, stomach-ache) and dealing with personal matters including caring for her unwell mother
• Conduct was isolated, discrete and momentary, occurring on a single day; deliberate but not planned or calculated