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It has been eight years since wrongdoing took place, seven months since a disciplinary tribunal began, and about £3 million has been racked up in costs by those involved.

So it feels somewhat anticlimactic that the final result was a £55,000 fine plus a similar amount in costs for Gary Senior, the former Baker McKenzie London head who was found guilty of sexual harassment and of seeking to improperly influence the internal investigation into the matter.

Some may view this as a victory for U.K. regulator the Solicitors Regulation Authority, which brought the case. A sign that the watchdog will go after the biggest names in its bid to stand up for women who have been harassed at work. But rest assured, this is no victory, not a clear one anyway.

The SRA failed in its claim against all the other defendants – Baker McKenzie, the firm's former head of dispute resolution Tom Cassels and its former head of human resources Martin Blackburn. All avoided any cost orders.

And not only does the final sanction for Senior seem minutely small compared with the costs and scale of the process, but everyone will have to wait until the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal's full judgment is released to find out how he could have been found guilty but not been banned from the profession.

After all, committing sexual harassment and then influencing the subsequent investigation sounds pretty serious. What does a lawyer have to do to lose their license to practice?

Parallels could be drawn here with the case of Ryan Beckwith, the former Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer partner who was fined £35,000 and ordered to pay costs to the tune of £200,000 but not banned from the profession by the tribunal after being accused of engaging in sexual activity with a junior without her consent.

In that case the SDT ruled his actions amounted to a "one-off incident", "a lapse in his judgment" and that misconduct was "highly unlikely to be repeated".

Contrast these sanctions with those given to some junior lawyers who some might say were guilty of lesser crimes.

Former Capsticks solicitor Claire Matthews was fined £10,000 and lost her license to practice law after losing a briefcase containing client documents then panicking and saying she still had it. It turns out the client on that day was the SRA itself. She is relying on crowdfunding to fund her appeal.

Haley Tansey, a former DWF trainee, was banned, rebuked and ordered to pay costs by the SRA after she "disclosed confidential information and personal data" to a friend "on multiple occasions without the firm's authority".

Louise Bolderstone, a trainee in Ropes & Gray's London office, was fined £2,000 plus costs and banned after recreating a client signature – a sanction that drew sympathy for her from many in the industry.

How do you lose your licence to practice law? Be a junior, it seems.

Granted, these were cases that involved clients, which the regulator appears to take particularly seriously. But what about the principle of acting with integrity, as required of a member of the profession, and behaving in a way that maintains the public trust?

The regulator's former executive director, Crispin Passmore, wrote an article for Legal Week in March saying "conduct in your private life might help the regulator judge how you may behave in your professional life. In the extreme, that might be something so serious that even though it is totally remote to the delivery of legal services it offends public values and the public's confidence in the regulated legal market and the solicitor's profession."

If that is a guide then one might have expected a harsher sanction.

Was the whole thing a waste of time? No. Senior is still the most high profile U.K. lawyer to have been found guilty of sexual harassment and the fact the case was brought at all shows the regulator is at least trying to take complaints seriously.

But given the case happened so long after the incident took place and Senior can still operate as a solicitor it is perhaps understandable if it has left a lot of people feeling slightly deflated.

Read More:

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Gary Senior Fined, Avoids Being Banned From Profession