Partner avoids strike off over sexual misconduct at law firm retreat 

Asked to spend night in colleague’s hotel room

A former partner at a leading national law firm has been suspended after a disciplinary tribunal found that he had acted inappropriately towards a female colleague during a partner retreat.

In June 2012, Matthew James Machen Barker, then a partner at Clarke Willmott, attended an away weekend with other partners at the Hallmark Hotel in Gloucester.

During the weekend, Barker is said to have went on a “power trip” and became aggressive towards a newly-promoted female partner. The woman, referred to in the ruling as ‘Person A’, said Barker also “boasted” about how he had made another newly made-up female partner “cry earlier in the evening”.

Although the matters date back to 2012, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) only became aware of them in 2019, some seven years later. Barker, who was on the firm’s management board at the time, left in 2019. He did not participate in the proceedings with the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT).

The woman told the tribunal that Barker wished to apologise and offered to walk her back to her hotel room to “show there were no hard feelings”. Upon arrival, he asked for a glass of water. When she went into the bathroom to fetch it, she realised Barker was now sitting on her bed and asked him to leave, but he didn’t.

Person A recalled that Barker asked if he could “lie next to her all night”, assuring her that she would be safe and explaining that “his prick didn’t work”.

Barker is then said to have “asked for a hug” and in an effort to persuade him to leave and to show that there were no hard feelings, the woman gave him a hug. It was at the point Barker “started rubbing her back”.

In a final effort to get him to leave, Person A suggested they walk back to his room together. As they started walking down the corridor, she took the opportunity to escape by quickly turning and walking back to her room without him.

Shortly after, Barker sent a text message to the woman saying, “Needing a cuddle”.

The firm carried out an investigatory meeting with Barker, in which he explained “he had made a fool of himself, was on medication and acted out of character”. He said he was “filled with regret and monumentally apologetic” and that his recollection of the evening was “patchy”.

Barker also accepted that as a consequence, it might not be credible for him to stay on as a partner and volunteered to step down from his position on the board, saying that “he had inflicted this on himself and he deserves what is coming to him”.

When contacted by the SRA in 2020, Barker said “he does not recognise himself in how he is described” and that he has “never behaved as alleged and is not an aggressive man”. He also told the regulator that “he would not have had a sexual mind-set, was married which he took very seriously”.

The SDT found that Barker had acted without integrity, that his behaviour was “sexually motivated”, and that there was a “clear power imbalance” between him and Person A.

In mitigation, the tribunal noted that he promptly apologised unreservedly, stepped down from the management board, and that the misconduct was a single episode in an otherwise unblemished career.

The SDT suspended Barker for nine months and ordered him to pay the regulator’s costs of £11,000.