Mahvash Ikram
A lawyer who traumatised staff by openly watching pornography at work is fighting to keep his name secret after appearing before the Lawyers & Conveyancers Disciplinary Tribunal this week.
According to the National Lawyers Standards Committee, the self-employed lawyer, who has interim name suppression, has been charged with misconduct after continuing to watch objectionable material at work on multiple occasions, despite being aware that his screen was visible to his employees.
The man’s lawyer, Briar Webster, told the tribunal that her client admits he suffered from a porn addiction at the time and accepts the charges of misconduct, saying he engaged in behaviour that was “egregious”. But, she said, he was not aware that his screen was visible to his employees until November 2022, when a senior staff member pointed it out to him.
Webster said the man immediately took steps to address his addiction-related issues. But months later that was followed by what Webster called a “relapse in his addiction”. The lawyer began watching porn at work again, this time fully aware that it adversely affected his staff. However, she said he soon realised he had a problem and again took precautionary measures, such as working from home.
“Most importantly, he’s overcome his addiction,” she said.
Impact significant
But the standards committee’s lawyer, Evan McCaughan, said the respondent’s actions had a significant and long-lasting impact on affected staff. McCaughan said one of the complainants still struggles with anxiety, panic attacks, insecurity, insomnia, low confidence and a short temper due to what she had witnessed while working for the respondent.
“[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 also 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.”
Toxic workplace
McCaughan said the committee wants the lawyer to be censured, temporarily suspended, ordered not to practise on his own account unless authorised by the tribunal and to pay $10,000 to $15,000 per complainant.
The tribunal’s Deputy Chairperson John Adams said, “at its heart”, the issue was one of sexual harassment or “rendering the work environment toxic for the employees over a long period of time”.
But Webster said her client was battling porn addiction at the time and asked the tribunal to take into consideration the remedial steps he took when he first learned that his screen was visible to others in the office.
“He was of course, mortified… He immediately sought counselling… told his wife… and he took very proactive steps to do something about it. He put a block on his computer.”
Referring to his relapse, she said it was not unusual for those battling addiction to fall back into old patterns. However, he regretted his actions and that was reflected in his guilty plea.
“His counsellor has said that it’s quite common in the early stages of attempting to control an addiction for an individual to remove a computer block in moments of craving, which is when rational thoughts are greatly reduced. So, this wasn’t a deliberate act. This wasn’t a man sitting at his computer thinking, ‘great, I know my employees can see this, I know this is affecting them. I’m going to do it anyway’.”
Victim impact
While the tribunal acknowledged that the respondent had mental health issues and took active steps to deal with his addiction, Adams said they had to consider the impact on the victims.
“If you kill somebody, you can’t bring them back to life. You can say you’re sorry about it afterwards and undertake therapy… In this case, the damage in terms of the experience of the work environment was done to the employees… Some of them will have taken their unhappiness away with them and had to deal with that in their own time.”
He added the tribunal had to consider how serious the allegations were in relation to similar offences.
“It’s tempting to think of simply allowing or tacitly allowing other people to be aware that watching this material in the workplace is less significant than actually physically touching somebody… We’ve opened a debate among ourselves around that… [for] physical incidents there have been suspensions of quite long periods… The critical point for us is pitching where this behaviour sits in a continuum of that behaviour.”
Adams said the tribunal would issue a decision in due course.
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