In November 2023, after being called to the Bar earlier in the year, the pupil barrister was set a task by her supervisor to draft a skeleton argument in support of an application for summary judgement, whilst he was out of the country working on a case.
The exercise had been based on a real case in which the pupil supervisor had previously worked on. He provided the pupil with the necessary documentation needed to complete the task.
However, the original case file existed in the supervisor’s office. Pupil A was not given permission to access the file, but did so anyway while working on the exercise.
According to Pupil A, she accessed the file to check where tabs were within the paper, where she came across the skeleton argument. This was not disclosed to Pupil Supervisor A, but when he read Pupil A’s submission, he noticed immediate similarities with his original work, the tribunal heard.
After Pupil Supervisor A notified chambers’ pupillage coordinators, Pupil A was called into a meeting, where she said she had “flicked through” the original file, but had completed the exercise without referencing it.
The chambers stated that this appeared to be a breach of the code of conduct and that she should self-report to the Bar regulator, the Bar Standards Board (BSB).
It was after this and multiple other meetings with members of chambers that Pupil A admitted she had downplayed the degree to which she had utilised the original skeleton.
The chambers terminated the pupillage, which Pupil A accepted and stated she had again self-reported to the BSB.
The tribunal heard that Pupil A said all that needed to be said about the circumstances of her misconduct and the devastating impact this case has had on her.
“She explained that she had felt alone, isolated, and ultimately inadequate in chambers. She said that all her pupillage applications had been to chambers specialising in commercial law and that that was the area of law that had interested her most, but at present she did not see herself returning to the Bar.
“She had gone from loving the law to no longer wishing to have anything to do with it. She could not even bear to listen to anything about the law on the radio and she now hated being in London.”
The tribunal also noted that “excellent character references” pointed toward the actions of Pupil A being “completely out of character” and that the situation was very unlikely to arise again.
It ordered that pupil A be suspended for 18 months, rather than be disbarred.
