In Ms WSS v Sterling Lawyers Limited Ms WSS was employed by the Respondent in the role of trainee solicitor from 1 July 2021 until 7 October 2022, when she was summarily dismissed for gross misconduct after forwarding 106 work-related emails to her personal account.
Sterling Law co-founder Ruslan Kosarenko stated in evidence that multiple concerns had arisen around her performance.
The firm required trainees to bill four times their salary, and Ms WSS appeared to be falling short of her £140k billing target.
Kurasenko said that he had received reports she was being rude to colleagues and refusing to attend the office during business hours, and that she had also granted refunds to eight clients without authorisation.
It also emerged that Ms WSS had sent 106 emails containing telephone logs, data and internal documents related to clients and staff from her work email account to a private address.
Ms WSS didn’t turn up for an HR meeting to address the various issues, and her attempt to explain under cross-examination why she had forwarded confidential information to her personal account was described by the tribunal as “somewhat evasive”.
“She provided no clear or satisfactory explanation as to why she had done so”, it said.
After her no-show at the HR meeting, Ms WSS told the firm’s directors to process the £9,000 of client refunds she had unilaterally granted, and she was promptly suspended on full pay while the firm investigated her work activities.
Ms WSS failed to attend a second meeting in September 2022, claiming she had covid, and said in her closing submissions that she had been afraid of in-person meetings because she was “at risk of not being able to leave the office alive in case of an emergency medical situation”.
Ms WSS did appear, by video, at third meeting, but it broke down in recriminations after 15 minutes and after failing to attend two further meetings she was sacked.
Although the evidence for much of Ms WSS’s alleged misconduct was “too sketchy” to warrant her sacking, the tribunal concluded that her email heist “amounted to a fundamental breach of her contract of employment justifying summary dismissal” and rejected her claim.
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