Agency over technocracy: how lawyer archetypes infect regulatory approaches: the FCA example

I am delighted to say a piece I did with Trevor Clark, Steven Vaughan, and Alan Brener has been published Open Access in Legal Ethics. Here is the abstract. it's about why the FCA was wrong to chicken out of bringing legal properly into the Senior Manager's Regime. That sentence was too short for an …

Judges ‘returning to practice’ (a footnote)

A quick postscript Monday's post on the following documents drawn to my attention by a kind reader. A Ministry of Justice Evidence Pack on Judicial Pay 2022/23 dating February this year appears to assume salaried judges cannot return to private practice: Salaried judges are unique in public service in that they are unable to return …

Can and should retired judges advise on live cases?

I have written before about former judges advising clients after they retire from the bench. Now seems an appropriate time to ask if the convention that they do not has ended, and if so, who decided and how. The case I am about to discuss raises a question as to whether the abandoning of the …

Independent investigations: pick your own judge

The FT contained a fascinating story on Freshfields investigation (£) into “the Reichelt affair” which it says “shows the inherent tension of compliance investigations — a system of corporate governance riddled with conflicts that is paid for, managed and communicated by a company itself.” I’m not going to analyse that in detail, not least because …

Lawfare: “an industry that hides evil in plain sight”?

A recent Commons debate on “Lawfare and the UK Court System” called by Conservative MP David Davis and Labour MP Liam Byrne is worthy of note. It is long, but also worth reading. Let me try and summarise what was said. The central accusation is that “These people [the rich, large organisations, and rich Russians …

Hush Money: POL and an NDA

Reading Nick Wallis’ immense book on the Post Office Scandal (buy it here, read my review here) I came across an example of something which has worried me for a considerable time. I do not think the profession, or its regulators, take this is sufficiently seriously. It is the potential perversion of civil justice through …

Submissions to the Horizon Post Office IT Inquiry

This is the intended text for oral submission to the Horizon Post Office IT Inquiry made by Richard Moorhead, yesterday based on the work of the team researching the Post Office Scandal at Exeter’s Evidence-Based Justice Lab , with Dr. Rebecca Helm (Exeter) and Dr. Karen Nokes (UCL).[1] I have three points, some are of …

Why the Williams’ Inquiry must not narrow its Horizons

Our latest submissions (Working Paper 4) to the Horizon Inquiry on Horizon is up on the Lab site. It responds to the Williams' Inquiry raising 4 issues about the scope of its work which suggests that someone (the Chairman? Post Office??) thinks Second Sight's Investigations; legal work on civil and criminal cases brought by Post …

LegalGeek: changed, yes; a terrible beauty, no (Guest Post)

The words of W.B. Yeats in his often quoted poem Easter 1916 could be applied in part – the first part – to Legal Geek which I attended yesterday in London: “All changed. Changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born”. The word terrible referred to the terror experienced by the repressed, as Yeats saw it. Covid 19 …

Mutually Assured Irresponsibility: An Example from the Post Office

A striking feature of many corporate or other scandals is how organisations and their lawyers construct a system of mutually assured irresponsibility. Some of this is done artfully, some without even thinking about it. The problem often, subtly or unsubtly, comes down to this: the client says they did what they did because the lawyer …