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 …

The Levitt Report: Independence Frayed

The Levitt Report into trouble at RICS is a document which may reverberate for a while. To anyone who has expressed doubts about whether an independent review is really independent here we have a blow by blow account that will give sceptics, especially any who have had cause to doubt a Fieldfisher review, a hefty …

Hillsborough III: No case to answer

Given the importance of the case, and that I have written about it before twice, I thought I should probably comment on the decision that there was no case to answer in the Hillsborough prosecution of SYP’s then solicitor, Peter Metcalf. The judge’s reasoning can be found here, alongside the press summary, and the important …

Post Office III: Pleas Displease Me

A quick post this one and then I have to go and do other things for a bit. Readers might be interested in an example piece of evidence which, for me, crystallises the problems at work. It shows the ways in which failures to prosecute ethically may link to failures to govern the company ethically …

Post Office II: Contempt, recusal, culture

A few extra points on what questions are posed the Post Office case now I have had a chance to dig into the detail a bit. The Court of Appeal praised the diligence and thoroughness of the post-conviction disclosure carried out in relation to the appeals (paragraph 61 of the Hamilton judgment). I think it …

The Post Office ‘where were the lawyers?’ post

Hamilton and Others-v-Post-Office [2021] EWCA Crim 577 is a pretty gut wrenching tale of corporate misdeeds. All the wrong doing is rather faceless at the minute, but it cannot – one hopes – remain that way for too much longer. For reasons which I will make clear some of those faces will very likely be …

Independence MsA takes

The FT have prised open some details on a case last heard in 2019 which illustrates some of the interesting problemns inherent in independent investigations. In this case, Ms A claimed unfair constructive dismissal and sex and disability discrimination, which included an allegation that she was raped by a UBS employee and failures in the …

Sloshed not sick?

The profession has certain stories it tells itself which are probably not true. One such is exposed by an interesting piece of US research by Listokin and Noonan (published here and available without a paywall, I think, here. That story is that, “lawyers are uniquely unhappy”, in particular that they suffer higher levels of mental …

Candour in Context: who’s activism should we spotlight?

The travails of Duncan Lewis, Stephanie Harrison QC and the rest of her team, in the R (DVP & Others) v SSHD[2021] EWHC 606 (Admin) [the DVP case] can be seen as grist to the Government's anti-activist lawyers mill. It's a toe-curling judgment. I am going to talk about the facts of the case at …

Discipline Data: women, the young, and the old, but in what order?

An interesting paper by Andy Boon and Avis Whyte has been published (paywalled I suspect) on SDT cases. the authors have painstakingly assembled data to be compared across three periods: 1994 to 1996 (collected by Davies), 2008 (with Boon, Whyte and Sherr) and 2015. They point to a strange failure of SDT case volumes to …