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 …

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 …