This is just a quick catch up blog things that happened last week which might be of interest. First the Legal Services Board has announced intentions to move forward on their rule of law work. The Board’s Board paper is here and draws significantly on the report I did with Steven Vaughan and Kenta Tsuda.
The fall-out from Michelle Mone and her libel lawyers continues to rumble on. Without my tongue anywhere near my cheek, I remind readers and the SRA that Graeme Johnston, Jenifer Swallow, and I suggested they might want to improve their guidance on confidentiality and reporting up and out around some time ago. Our own work might need a finesse, although it still holds good, after Al Sadeq v Dechert LLP [2024] EWCA Civ 28 an interesting case on legal professional privilege.
In the meantime, the Post Office Scandal continued to dominate my own newsfeed. I have written three blogs on my scandal-dedicated substack: one about accusations a former general counsel helped the Post Office CEO shutdown MPs and sub-postmasters when making complaints of miscarriages of justice; the second post seemed to strike a chord, it dealt with professional complacency (the professional imaginarium) and the inadequacy of lawyer apologies in the Post Office scandal; the third a brief detour into how corporate codes of ethics and what one might politely describe as mealy-mouthed lawyering can be uncomfortable bedfellows.
North of the border, successful appeals appear to be being granted without judgments yet being issued, whilst it emerged that the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal talked out of ditching Horizon prosecutions in 2013.
Meanwhile, the Law Society south of the border continues its immaculate silence on things Post Office.
Lawyer Watch 
Many thanks as ever Richard
On SRA ‘disclosure’: I have been referred to their disclosure principles https://www.sra.org.uk/sra/how-we-work/privacy-data-information/disclosure-policy/ last updated, they say, in March 2023 – ie 6 months after your commentary. I am not sure you are referring to the same document as disclosure of confidential documents.
The SRA ‘dislosure’ principles document seems to suffer from a couple of obvious failings: (1) SRA make no attempt to stick to the CPR 1998 definition of ‘disclosure’ (ie telling a person being investigated what they have) rather than release of documents; and (2) these ‘principles’ are not clear: I think they refer to release of documents to third parties, but SRA seem to think they refer to production of material to a party to their investigation.