Any expert witness who has had to badger solicitors to get their fee paid (an entertaining article in a past issue of Your Expert Witness highlighted the issue) will be aghast at recent news from the Old Bailey. There, former Fulbright Jaworski lawyer Richard Simkin and his wife, former office manager Zaki Sharif, were found guilty swindling the law firm out of £100,000, as reported by The Epilogue, the newsletter of legal recruitment site Professionals in Law.
The money, a combination of false expenses and bogus agency invoices, paid for luxury holidays in Mexico and Hong Kong, Harley Street skin treatment, silk bedding and even a £2,400 signed photo of Mohammed Ali (honest!). While the duo get to dwell on their mis-deeds at leisure (presumably bemoaning at length the injustice of being caught), the rest of us, and particularly said unpaid expert witnesses, cannot but be scandalised that the fraud was allowed to go on for so long.
The fault is compounded when we learn that Sharif got the £95,000pa manager’s job by falsely claiming to have two law degrees! You have to wonder about their recruitment process when they can’t even check out a CV properly! Even worse, another law firm, Holman, Fenwick and Willan, gave her an even higher paid job when she got the shove from Fulbright’s.
The sorry saga is just another example of the all-consuming greed that seems to consume elements in our society – and sadly among the professional and ruling elite. That two people earning what most would see as a small fortune every year really need to add to that pile illegitimately, and in a way that held such catastrophic consequences? Did the fiasco of MP’s expenses teach them nothing?
The same principal, but in a different way, was demonstrated by another former high-flying lawyer who now finds himself in the slammer.
US legal news site Above the Law reports how Francis Bridgeman’s life and career took a nose dive when he had a few too many after work in April 2010. Upon leaving the train from London to the village where he lived he got in his car to drive home. When the inevitable happened and he crashed the car he walked home, only to be visited by the local constabulary. Being suspicious types and experts themselves in sniffing out the truth (it smelled of alcohol), they refused to believe his entirely plausible story about being kidnapped at gunpoint and arrested him. The rest is what always follows in these cases.
The issue that shouts out is, of course, not that he should have had a jolly time after work, or that he should be so irresponsible as to drive his car when obviously over the limit. It is why someone in a position of privilege and responsibility, with a whopping salary and a large house in the country, should risk everything for the price of a cab fare! Those are just two of what seems to be a rash of stories about laywerly misdemeanours in recent weeks. I wonder how many in the legal profession trawl the columns of this site’s Expert Witness Directory for their own purposes.