Lawyer struck off for billing 23 hours in just one day
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) found that Natasha Janet Dionne Fairs, who joined the firm in 2007 and rose to senior associate in 2022, repeatedly overstated her hours across several years.
A former senior associate at Irwin Mitchell has been struck off after admitting to filing inflated and misleading timesheets — including one extraordinary entry recording almost 23 hours of billable work in a single day.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) found that Natasha Janet Dionne Fairs, who joined the firm in 2007 and rose to senior associate in 2022, repeatedly overstated her hours across several years.
Although clients were not directly billed for the false entries, the SDT said her actions distorted internal fee allocations and damaged the firm’s operations.
Red Flags in Billing
The review of her records uncovered several extreme anomalies:
20 hours 24 minutes logged on one day in April 2020
22.9 hours in April 2022
18.1 hours in April 2023
In some cases, she recorded only a handful of six-minute units on the file, but added five hours of work against the same matter in the system.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) said the pattern suggested deliberate manipulation:
Fairs, who qualified as a solicitor in 2003, admitted the misconduct and apologised. She told the tribunal she had been struggling with intense personal and professional pressures — including her mother’s illness and death, pandemic homeschooling, and an overwhelming caseload of “high-volume, low-value” work.
In mitigation, she argued that time targets at the firm were heavily emphasised and that support for her difficulties was either unavailable or not offered. The SRA rejected this as justification.
The tribunal struck Fairs off the roll of solicitors and ordered her to pay £5,200 in costs.
