Made inappropriate comments to female colleagues
A senior partner has been suspended from the profession for two years after multiple instances of sexual misconduct, including having sex with a junior female colleague on his office desk.
The incidents began in October 2015 when Jasvinder Singh Gill took a colleague, referred to as ‘Person A’, out to a pub, later asking her to come to his office where he kissed her on the lips.
In November 2019, Gill also behaved inappropriately before a work-related event in Bristol. He returned to his hotel room with another junior female colleague, ‘Person B’, to order a takeaway pizza. He then changed into his loungewear in the bathroom, got onto the bed while Person B was sitting on it, and asked her if she wanted an alcoholic drink with her pizza.
Furthermore, between April 2019 and October 2020, the experienced solicitor initiated a sexual relationship with a third colleague, referred to as ‘Person C’. Gill leaned in and kissed the woman while they were in the office with the door closed, kissed her on several other occasions, behaved in a “flirtatious way with physical touching,” and had sex with her on the desk twice. These encounters were all consensual.
The senior partner also made a range of “inappropriate” comments, including telling Person A that he preferred female employees to wear open-toe shoes, stockings instead of tights, and short skirts, describing this attire as “proper office attire.” He also told a fourth woman, Person D, that there was a “preferred” office dress code of skirts, rather than trousers and high heels and asking her when she was going to wear a dress.
The tribunal noted that “behaving in this way to junior female employees, when there was an inherent power imbalance between himself, as the senior partner of the firm and a solicitor in his forties, and each of them, as more junior and younger colleagues, may have prevented them from refusing to engage with him and/or from refusing his requests”.
The tribunal said it was not the “arbiter of morals and human frailty,” but noted that Gill had conducted himself towards junior staff in a “wrong and inappropriate” manner.
The senior partner “had, on repeated occasions, used his position of influence and authority in the workplace to create situations in which office relationships, sexual in intent, were initiated and pursued by him,” the tribunal said.
His “motivation had been a sexual one and his conduct placed the female employees who he had picked upon with the no doubt unsettling dilemma that rebuffing him would or could count against them in their continuing employment within the firm and the resultant difficulties of leaving the firm and seeking new employment.”
Gill advanced several health-related mitigation points, all of which were redacted from the public ruling.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal approved a statement of agreed facts and outcome between the Solicitors Regulation Authority and Gill, who was ordered to pay over £85,000 in costs.