Mahvash Ikram
A lawyer who traumatised female staff for years by openly watching pornography at work, sometimes several times a day, has been censured, suspended for three months and banned from practising on his own account.
The man has also been ordered to pay more than $25,000, including $5,000 each to two of his victims, $15,000 in costs to the National Lawyers Standards Committee and reimbursement of costs to the Lawyers and Conveyancers Disciplinary Tribunal.
The sole practitioner, who is no longer working as a lawyer, has interim name suppression until Friday December 5, when the disciplinary tribunal was going to reveal his identity. The man has now appealed, so name suppression will remain in the meantime.
In its decision, the tribunal – headed by deputy chairman John Adams – refers to the man as “Mr H” and says his conduct created a “toxic and emotionally unsafe” work environment for the female staffers, who felt “horror, shock, disgust, discomfort, embarrassment and shame” at the images they saw.
The tribunal said that suspending Mr H, even though he no longer practises, was necessary to send a deterrent message to the profession and satisfy the public that such misconduct was being treated with appropriate gravity.
“Had he been practising, we may well have considered a longer suspension as appropriate,” the tribunal said.
“As noted earlier, we treat this misconduct as being on a continuum with cases along the Gardner-Hopkins line.”
James Gardner-Hopkins, a former partner at Russell McVeagh, was suspended for three years in 2022 for sexual misconduct. He applied to the New Zealand Law Society to regain his practising certificate in March this year after the penalty period expired.
Grave and reckless ‘lapses’
While Mr H’s conduct was not criminal, the tribunal found it was grave, citing other cases it had considered.
“Unlike the assaultive behaviour in Gardner-Hopkins, Q, or Mulligan, Mr H’s conduct was not criminally unlawful,” it said.
“But it continued over a long period of time (from 2016) and its recurrences in 2023 occurred after he was expressly on notice. We find the long period he exposed his staff to the material aggravates the gravity of his misconduct.
“We assess the gravity against the understandable distaste it caused his employees. When assessing the harmfulness of his misconduct, we do not grade it lower than fleeting, unwelcome, drunken fondling. We find the repetitive pattern of recklessness arguably constitutes a greater gravity than that. This context makes his ‘lapses’ graver.”
The man exposed the women employed in his small practice “fleetingly but repeatedly, to pornographic material” that he viewed on his office computer. Sometimes they saw “snippet[s]” as he “clicked out of objectionable internet sites” when they entered the room.
According to the decision, his computer screen had been repositioned in 2018, making the material directly visible from the doorway, which meant staff could see what he was looking at and eventually became acutely aware of his interest in the “sexualised objectification of women”.
In November 2022, a senior colleague confronted the man after another staff member complained to her about the issue. Despite Mr H promising not to watch porn at work again, an employee “saw an [objectionable] image on his screen” in January 2023, triggering further complaints.
He initially denied the incident, which the tribunal described as “an aggravating feature” in the case, but admitted it a month later after another incident resulted in a further complaint.
He then started working from home.
Power imbalance
The tribunal said all staff members at the practice were female, with Mr H, their employer, the only male. This explained their distress and reluctance to confront him about his behaviour.
“The staff… suffered the vulnerability of a power imbalance because they were anxious about adverse effects on their employment if they complained… The prospect of raising these concerns with Mr H was inherently daunting.”
The tribunal said Mr H showed “wilful blindness” in continuing to expose staff to pornography, aggravated by “remarkably obtuse” insensitivity.
It also noted that Mr H had three prior findings of unsatisfactory conduct, one dating back to 2011 and two from this year, which both involved irregularities in trust-accounting records.
“Apart from indicating congruent laxity or carelessness, they add little significance to the present charge,” the tribunal said.
At a hearing into the matter last month, the tribunal was told one of the complainants still struggles with anxiety, panic attacks, insecurity, insomnia, low confidence and a short temper due to what she had witnessed.
“[The] short temper has, in her words, fractured her relationship with her children. She developed physical manifestations of that stress… teeth clenching which required dentistry work… she also developed an eating disorder. She has spent untold hours in counselling, trying to unpack, decompress and process trauma resulting from these actions.”
Another staff member, a young female lawyer, has been in counselling ever since she stopped working at the firm.
“[The respondent’s] behaviour made her question whether law was the right career path for her. It led her to believe that perhaps this was just the way things were. You can look at the powerful impact statements provided by the complainants… It had serious impacts on them at the time and it continues to do so more than two years after the event.”
Long-standing addiction
The tribunal accepted that the lawyer’s misconduct, and his failure to stop even when confronted about his conduct, was driven by a long-standing addiction to pornography, resulting from depression.
While acknowledging Mr H was “not in a healthy frame of mind” at the time, the tribunal also noted this was little comfort to his employees.
It declined to make name suppression permanent, saying the disciplinary process is ordinarily public and his circumstances did not meet the threshold required to displace open-justice principles.
While Mr H had expressed anxiety about publication of his name, the tribunal said that “his personal embarrassment is not a strongly persuasive factor, but it deserves note”.
It acknowledged evidence from Mr H’s therapist about his sense of shame and guilt, saying that although the behaviour constituted harassment, it “was neither criminal nor assaultive”.
It said Mr H had undertaken drastic changes at great financial and career costs, noting that he “appears to have conquered these demons”.
While recognising those considerations, the tribunal found that they did not outweigh the public interest in transparency. It said the case was likely to attract attention because “there has been no similar case” focused purely on employer duties.
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