Lawyers , The Law Society and the Post Office Scandal

Tomorrow there will be a meeting of the Justice Committee.  It will be attended by various regulators and others involved with the UK legal industry.  I wrote a few weeks ago to the new President of The Law Society, Nick Emmerson,  before I knew about it. Then I wrote again.As I have received no response,  I thought I'd put my letter on LinkedIn, because my clients and I think it is important. It is amended slightly because of the context .

“If you have read the two copies of the letter I sent you [ and to which I have received no response at all, which is why this is now being published on social media ] , you will by now be aware that I still represent three of the more than 730 victims of the Post Office Scandal in various matters. My clients are “TF “, “SM” and “JS”. You know their full names and you may have heard of them, even seen them being interviewed across the UK media over the years.  I am not a litigator but a long-time corporate lawyer who, for various reasons, ended up assisting them during their appeals against conviction. In aggregate, it took 44 years for their wrongful convictions, (following wrongful prosecutions and trials) to be overturned.  My current role for my three clients can be best described as old-fashioned Client Care. I have had this role since April 2021 when their Appeals (three of the thirty-nine that day), were successful in the Court of Appeal, Criminal Division.

One of the roles for which I am tasked, is ensuring that the Post Office Scandal including the role of lawyers and the legal industry (no longer, alas, a profession in the view of Post Office Scandal victims) is kept firmly in the public spotlight. If you have spent any time over the last six weeks or so looking at LinkedIn, you will already know that is the case. I note, purely in passing, that with my two extraordinary barrister colleagues, I spent the first year or so working on this matter on a pro bono basis.  It may well be that only the firm founded by Lindsay Healy - Founder Aria Grace Law CIC Healy) would have allowed me to do so.

Of your two immediate predecessors at the Law Society, one was, it is not unfair to suggest, disinterested in all matters around the Post Office Scandal as was made clear. Your immediate predecessor made much of suggesting integrity and ethical behaviour of lawyers would be a key part of her tenure. Perhaps it was. On the other hand, I am being told the issue of the Post Office Scandal and the lawyers who aided and abetted the worst miscarriage of justice in English legal history, is one that the Law Society would rather just go away; I have no idea.

But it won’t go away, quietly or otherwise. With a TV series coming out in early 2024 and other continuing media interest; with lawyers currently facing the Post Office Enquiry—including the hapless and hopeless Mr Jarnail Singh and the unrepentant Stephen Dilley and Mandy Talbot ,this really isn’t something to be hidden behind the curtain.  To date there have been more than 60 deaths and several suicides attributable to the Post Office Scandal.  The Scandal was aided and abetted by internal and external solicitors and barristers working for the Post Office, I am sure you are aware of all this too.

I understand almost all lawyers are (for want of a better phrase) gagged from talking about any of these matters, either through their partnership deeds or their employment agreements. However, the apparent silence of of academics who teach and research in law faculties in the UK is, frankly, shameful.

There is certainly a huge amount of publicly available information about individual sub-postmasters by way of background. TF who gave an impact statement to the Enquiry, was shoved into Holloway Prison when she was 19 years old—she is now 41. The governor couldn’t understand why she was there. The point is often repeated, she walked into a cell and saw another inmate had committed suicide by hanging herself.

SM was jailed when she was eight weeks pregnant and taken from the court in handcuffs. The “poster girl “for the Post Office legal teams, for all the wrong reasons. By making an example of her, they hoped other people would "go quietly". And in each case people knew, lawyers knew, the truth/ the facts, we really don’t need to debate semantics.

So, where now?

A few suggestions and comments.

1.             Take away the 2018 discredited “In-House legal team of the year award “from the POL team which is still led by Ben Foat.  It was suggested to your predecessor who declined our idea. At the very least, the Law Society’s failure to rescind the award very much increases the risk that the general public will think that it condones the misconduct of the Post Office through its accolade of Foat.

2.             Ask Council members to watch the evidence given to the Enquiry by TF , mentioned above and listen to the two podcasts by JS made with the Guardian newspaper.  She suffered a physical breakdown because of the behaviour of the Post Office – and that was after she was released from jail. She was in hospital for many months. 16 years on, she has not recovered, she remains disabled.

3.             We believe that to date no one from the Law Society Council has asked to meet any of the victims –why is that?

Those are easy. This next one is anything but.

4.             Please do think carefully about the way the legal industry is perceived by thousands of people involved in /destroyed by the Post Office Scandal. You have recently made great play of the fact the UK legal profession is envied across the world. Once people know about the Post Office Scandal, some revise their views. Comments from lawyers and non-lawyers across the world reflect this. People across social media, some with many thousands of followers , support the victims in their claims for compensation and “ justice “ , whatever that means.

I know a little about the UK and international law. And there is much more to English law than advising multinational corporate finance deals and litigation involving the very wealthy. The failures around the Post Office Scandal and the way many lawyers behaved over the decades are becoming ever more well known to the public the UK. I am contacted regularly by people who know people who have been affected. This is a stain on the legal fabric of UK society. Media interest continues and numerous MPs, whether lawyers or others, are watching. Silence is not the answer.

 The Law Society has failed for far too long to speak out about this miscarriage of justice and its effects on thousands, of people. “