Robert William Henry Arnison

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

Robert Arnison, a partner at DLA Piper, admitted that on 5 February 2020 he inserted a false witness signature (a squiggle) on a legal charge document during a £13.5m property transaction and forwarded it to the lending bank's solicitors, purporting it had been properly witnessed. He admitted dishonesty and breaches of Principles 2, 4 and 5. The Tribunal, approving an agreed outcome, found exceptional circumstances existed (momentary, unplanned, no personal benefit, impaired decision-making, prompt self-reporting) placing the case in the 'small residual category' where strike-off was disproportionate. It imposed a 12-month suspension effective immediately (refusing to backdate) and costs of £17,250.

Duties found breached:

• Non-discriminatory acceptance and cab-rank

Aggravating factors:

• Very experienced solicitor and partner at the time of misconduct
• Misconduct took place in the context of a high value (£13.5m) property transaction
• Involved a false representation being made to another party
• Risk of harm to the public

Mitigating factors:

• Misconduct was momentary, unplanned and a 'moment of madness'
• No personal benefit
• Medical evidence indicated impaired decision making at the time
• Self-reported to the firm almost immediately and to the SRA
• Full admissions and cooperation with the SRA
• 23 years of practice with no prior regulatory or disciplinary history
• Complete insight and genuine remorse
• Overloaded with work, on verge of burnout
• No actual harm caused
• File review of ~40 cases found no other malpractice