Barrister smacked junior’s backside

A BARRISTER has been fined £6,000 for slapping a colleague’s backside.

Dominic Woolard pulled the junior employee on to his lap before holding her neck, a disciplinary tribunal heard.

He is said to have told her: ‘I really wanted to smack your a**e.’

His actions were sexual and brought shame to his profession, the three-person bar panel ruled yesterday.

His slap is said to have caused the woman – referred to as ‘A’ – physical pain. The panel concluded: ‘Dominic Woolard, a practising barrister, acted without integrity and did something which could be reasonably seen by the public to undermine his integrity... violating A’s dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or otherwise offensive environment.’

Woolard, who has worked as a CPS prosecutor in the South East and Midlands, is said to have grabbed her in December 2018.

The panel reprimanded him and ordered him to pay £3,600 costs as well as the fine. The tribunal’s full decision has not yet been published. But some commentators on website Legal Cheek are already suggesting that the sanction is lenient and that Woolard should have been struck off.

One wrote: ‘You see legal professionals having been struck off for much less serious acts, yet this barrister was only fined? This seems completely unjust.’

Another, calling themselves an ‘irate solicitor’, said: ‘How on earth have we gotten to such a state where the Bar Standards Board lets this go with a light slap on the wrist?’

Woolard, a graduate of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, was called to the Bar in 2008. The ruling is open to appeal.