Mariam El-Sobky was disbarred after the Bar Tribunals & Adjudication Services found she made audio recordings of family court hearings without consent and acted dishonestly and without integrity. The case centred on conduct between March 2021 and December 2021, when she made at least three separate recordings and sent them to employees for transcription.
Bar Tribunals & Adjudication Services
The tribunal said El-Sobky had been called to the bar in March 2001. It found that she made dishonest and/or misleading statements to court, failed to keep a client’s affairs confidential and sent appeal papers to the personal email address of someone employed to work on the case without first securing a confidentiality agreement.
Those findings came alongside a separate account of her treatment of a former employee. The tribunal said she harassed that employee by making fun of confidential mental health issues in a group chat.
Bar Standards Board
A spokesperson for the Bar Standards Board said: “Ms El-Sobky failed to observe her duty to the court in the administration of justice. This behaviour falls far below the standards the public rightly expect of barristers. The decision to disbar reflects the seriousness of the misconduct in this case.”
The regulator’s statement leaves the practical result plain: disbarment removes her from the profession and follows findings across three cases heard by the tribunal. For parties in family proceedings, the ruling also shows that covert recordings and later use of them can lead to the strongest disciplinary outcome when the tribunal finds dishonesty and a lack of integrity.
The question left open by the record is why she chose to make the recordings in the first place. What the tribunal did decide was that she knew she was not lawfully entitled to do it, yet repeated the conduct at least three times.
