A senior solicitor has been suspended for two years after he had sex with a junior lawyer twice on his desk and told female staff to wear short skirts.
Jasvinder Gill, a senior partner at the law firm, abused his ‘position of authority and influence’ at the firm and pursued sexual relationships with multiple women, a tribunal found.
The lawyer, 50, flirted with one junior lawyer after she joined, kissed her in the office, and romped with her on his desk.
Gill told female staff members that he ‘preferred female employees to wear open toe shoes, stockings and not tights, and short skirts’ – and described it as ‘proper office attire’.
Gill has now been suspended for two years at a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal [SDT] and ordered to pay £85,501 costs.
Jasvinder Gill, a senior partner at the law firm has been suspended for two years after pursuing sexual relationships with multiple female members of staff
The panel criticised Gill for abusing the ‘power imbalance’, saying his conduct towards four women made them fearful their career would suffer if they rejected him.
The SDT tribunal heard Gill behaved inappropriately towards junior female colleagues between October 2015 and September 2020, when he was between the ages of 41 and 46.
The name of the firm was redacted, however the tribunal heard its website describes Gill as the ‘Senior Partner with overall responsibility for the day to day management of the firm and for ensuring high levels of client satisfaction’.
The tribunal heard that Gill struck up a sexual relationship with ‘Person A’ after she joined the firm in October 2015.
He invited her to a pub lunch then requesting her to come to his office where he kissed her on the lips.
During their relationship, Gill told Person A ‘that he preferred female employees to wear open toe shoes, stockings and not tights and short skirts’, describing this dress as ‘proper office attire’.
In November 2019, shortly after junior lawyer ‘Person B’ joined the company, he invited her to his hotel room during a work trip to Bristol.
He took her to his room to order takeaway pizza, changed into his loungewear and laid on the bed.
He also offered her an alcoholic beverage while she sat on the bed waiting for pizza, and on another occasion joked about a child looking up Person B’s skirt.
Gill repeatedly entered the office that Person A shared with Person B, stroking Person A’s hair and giving her a shoulder massage, while Person B was present.
Between April 2019 and October 2020, he also began a sexual relationship with ‘Person C’ after she joined the firm.
It was heard Gill regularly kissed with Person C while his office door was closed, regularly flirted with her, and put his hand on her knee when they kissed.
Gill even had sex with Person C on his desk twice, it was heard.
He told Person C he loved summer because he got to see her ‘wearing a short, flowery summer dress with no tights’.
A fourth woman, Person D, was also told that there was a ‘preferred’ office dress code of ‘skirts, rather than trousers and high heels’.
She recalled being quizzed by Gill on what she thought about stockings and when she was going to wear a dress.
The panel found that Gill’s behaviour was inappropriate and driven by his sexual desires.
Alison Banks, chair of the SDT panel, said Gill was ‘an experienced and well regarded solicitor who had built a thriving business, yet, admittedly, he had conducted himself towards more junior staff in a way which was wrong and inappropriate’.
She added: ‘[Gill] 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.
‘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.
‘Even with the benefit of the mitigation applied in his favour, [Gill’s] misconduct could only be viewed as extremely concerning and very serious.
The Tribunal concluded that a solicitor with integrity with such a senior position would have acknowledged the ‘power imbalance’ in these relationships.
They added that such an individual would have realised his actions were ‘totally unacceptable within the professional environment of the workplace and deeply unsettling for the staff in general, and female staff in particular.’
Gill, who qualified in 1999, provided mitigation in relation to his health.