SRA Refers Two Solicitors to the Tribunal Over Post Office Horizon-Related Conduct

The long regulatory tail of the Post Office Horizon scandal has reached two more solicitors. The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has brought charges against Jane Elizabeth MacLeod and Nicholas Simon Barry Gould and referred both to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT), which will decide whether the allegations are proved. Nothing has yet been determined, and both remain entitled to the presumption that the charges must be established before any finding is made.

The referrals are a reminder that the conduct of lawyers connected to the Post Office continues to be scrutinised well after the events that caused the underlying miscarriages of justice — and that professional-conduct obligations, including cooperation with a public inquiry, are being enforced.

The charges against Jane MacLeod

Ms MacLeod was the Post Office’s general counsel between 2015 and 2019. The SRA’s allegation concerns a later period — between 11 April and 31 July 2024 — and centres on an alleged failure to cooperate fully with the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry in relation to a request that she provide oral evidence. In other words, the charge is not about the historic prosecutions themselves but about her response to the Inquiry examining them.

The charges against Nicholas Gould

The allegations against Mr Gould span a longer period, from May 2021 to April 2025, and are of a different character. The SRA alleges that he failed to provide adequate information about the overall costs and legal work carried out for clients, raised invoices without proper justification, sent inappropriate or offensive correspondence, and breached client confidentiality. Each allegation will be tested before the tribunal.

Why the SRA can proceed now

A recurring difficulty in Horizon-related regulation has been timing: disciplinary action must not cut across live criminal investigations or the public inquiry. The SRA has said these particular referrals concern conduct after the main events, and can proceed because they are unlikely to prejudice those ongoing processes. That framing is significant — it marks out a category of conduct the regulator considers ready to be dealt with even while other strands of the scandal remain unresolved.

The wider Horizon context

The Post Office Horizon scandal, in which sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted on the strength of flawed IT evidence, has driven overturned convictions — including that of Seema Misra in 2021 — a statutory public inquiry, and police investigation. The role played by lawyers, both inside the Post Office and among its external advisers, has been a persistent theme, and the professional regulator’s scrutiny of individual solicitors is one of the ways that accountability is being pursued.

What it means for lawyers and in-house counsel

For the profession, the referrals underline two points. First, cooperation with a public inquiry is itself a regulated obligation: how a lawyer responds to a request to give evidence can become the subject of disciplinary charges. Second, the ordinary duties around costs transparency, billing, professional communication and confidentiality remain enforceable regardless of the wider controversy in which they arise. For in-house and private-practice lawyers alike, the case is a reminder that conduct is judged not only in the moment of a crisis but in everything that follows it.