A legal worker has been banned for life after lying to his colleagues about working in the office when he was actually at home.

Dylan Patel, a former compliance officer at Stephenson Harwood, was barred by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) after he was found to have constructed an elaborate web of lies about attending the law firm’s central London office last year.

In November 2024, Mr Patel had been told to come into the law firm’s office but remained working remotely at his London home.

When a colleague attempted to find him in the office, he tried to deter her by saying he was too busy to talk, the SRA found.

Mr Patel then constructed a complex story involving fake security guards and Wi-Fi details to cover his tracks during a series of investigatory meetings a week later.

In these meetings, he insisted he had been working in the office the whole time as he invented details to support his claims.

He claimed that he had forgotten his pass on the day in question and that he had been let into Stephenson Harwood’s offices by a security guard, who granted him access to the building.

In the meeting, Mr Patel also provided a description of the security guard who allegedly let him into the office and put forward various details of where he sat in the office and when he arrived and left, while claiming he logged into the company Wi-Fi too.

Long-term career sabotage

However, he was ruled to have acted dishonestly after it was decided that he had in fact been working from home and had lied to his employer, the SRA said.

Mr Patel has now been banned from working in law firms without the SRA’s prior approval. He was also ordered to pay £600 to the SRA to cover a proportion of the regulator’s costs.

Stephenson Harwood is one of the biggest law firms in Britain, with over 1,500 staff across 10 offices worldwide.

It currently allows staff to work from home two days per week as part of a hybrid working policy which emerged in the wake of the Covid pandemic.

In 2022, the firm offered new recruits the chance to work from home permanently but for a 20pc lower salary.

Newly qualified lawyers at Stephenson Harwood are paid salaries of £105,000 a year, while the law firm’s partners take away average annual payouts of around £1m.

The law firm has worked on a series of high profile cases, including by representing British shareholders in Yukos Oil against the Russian government and by working for victims of fraudster Bernie Madoff. (The Telegraph)

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