Senior solicitor reprimanded for inappropriate comments to probation officer

Showed her pic of naked woman

A senior solicitor has been reprimanded after making a series of inappropriate comments towards a junior female probation officer.

Geoffrey White, who was admitted to the roll in 1993, faced a disciplinary tribunal after two separate incidents involving the same female probation officer at Crawley Magistrates Court.

The actions date back to May 2021, where White made “inappropriate and/or unwanted comments” towards the officer, referred to in the ruling as Person A. This included showing the unnamed woman an image on his phone of a naked woman lying down on a table with bottles covering her breasts, before saying to probation office that “it looks a bit like you”.

Person A stated that this made her feel “awkward, embarrassed and uncomfortable because the person in the picture was naked”. She added that “she did not know how to react”, found the situation “all very weird”, and “was not sure why” White had shown her the image.

Two months later, White was representing a client who had been arrested for allegedly having sex on a train. While the court was not in session, he attempted to joke about the offence with a senior prosecutor, saying: “[Person A] knows all about that, standard probation practice.”

Person A took this as a suggestion that she had sex on a train all the time, and that it was ordinary practice for probation officers to do this. This, she said, made her feel “really uncomfortable because it is a totally outrageous thing to say and not at all appropriate”.

These actions, the Solicitor’s Disciplinary Tribunal said in its judgment, breached White’s duties to act in a way that upholds public trust and confidence in the solicitors’ profession, and to act in a way that encourages equality, diversity, and inclusion.

In mitigation it was accepted that White apologised to Person A at the end of 2021, and that this was acknowledged. In his apology he said that he had “just wanted to make people laugh but that he had got it wrong with her”, before adding “something along the lines of: ‘everything I do is to make people laugh, with you I got it catastrophically wrong and I am truly sorry. We will let the SRA do whatever they are going to do’”.

It as also accepted that White’s behaviour changed following Person A’s complaint about the comments, and that her view was that he made “specific effort” not to make inappropriate comments towards her.

White also confirmed to the tribunal that he not received any specific diversity and inclusion or workplace sensitivity training. He explained that he had qualified during a time when “robing room banter” was common, but that the “world had moved on and he with it as evidenced by the absence of further complaints”.

The tribunal considered that the risk of repetition was very low.

Along with being reprimanded White was ordered to pay an agreed sum of £12,000 in costs.