Ball v JMW Solicitors: client file must come before particulars of claim, rules High Court

A solicitors' firm facing a professional negligence claim worth over £500,000 has been ordered to hand over its client file before the claimants are required to plead their case. The ruling from Master Clark in the Business and Property Courts carries a message that will resonate well beyond this particular dispute: telling a former client to wait for disclosure is not a substitute for giving them what is already theirs.

The claimants, Molly Ball and Claire Lamb, own leasehold flats in a central London redevelopment called The Belvedere. Since purchase, they have dealt with persistent problems with the heating and hot water systems. In 2018 they instructed JMW Solicitors to pursue claims against the developer group, Regal. The claim was issued in October 2019, after the primary six-year limitation period had already expired from the date of practical completion. The limitation point became central to the claimants' subsequent complaints about how their case had been handled.

The defendant firm provided approximately 2,000 pages of documents when asked for the file in March 2022. Gaps were identified almost immediately. Requests for missing documents followed over the next three years, with the firm maintaining that everything to which the claimants were entitled had been provided. By September 2025, with the limitation period for the negligence claim itself about to expire, a protective claim form was issued. The application before Master Clark sought both an extension of time for particulars of claim and an order for delivery up of the complete file.

On the file question, the defendant's position had quietly unravelled by the time of the hearing. It accepted that certain documents which ought to have been on the file were missing, including contemporaneous correspondence about the removal of six defendants from the Regal claim, records of instructions to counsel, and documents evidencing internal discussions about limitation advice in late 2021. Its defence was that searches had been exhaustive, but it had provided no evidence of what those searches actually involved: no explanation of how the file was maintained, how documents came to be missing, or what further searches might be possible. Master Clark was unimpressed. An assertion of thoroughness without any supporting detail does not satisfy the court.

The firm's fallback argument was more striking: that any remaining documents would surface through disclosure once the claim was properly underway. Master Clark rejected this as misconceived. The claimants' entitlement to their own client file is proprietary, not relevance-based. Documents from that file are not simply items to be disclosed if and when they become relevant to a pleaded allegation; they belong to the client in the first place. Conditioning access to them on the claimants first pleading a case that those very documents might inform inverts the proper order of things.

On the extension of time, the court found that requiring the claimants to finalise particulars of claim before receiving the complete file would almost certainly produce amendment applications later. The costs of those amendments, at least until the end of proceedings, would fall on the claimants. The defendant would be entitled to oppose any amendment and seek costs. All of that procedural friction could be avoided simply by providing the file first. That is not special treatment; it is proportionate case management.

Master Clark went further, indicating that even if he had been wrong on the primary point, he would have granted a short further extension in any event. The claimants had issued within the limitation period, served in time, and sought an extension from the defendant nearly four weeks before the deadline. Refusing any extension in those circumstances would have conferred the effect of an unless order where none had previously been imposed. Given a claim valued at over £500,000, the prejudice calculus pointed only one way.

The judgement is a practical check on a tactic, perhaps not always conscious, of treating a client file as just another category of disclosure rather than as property that was never really the firm's to withhold.

Ball & Anor v JMW Solicitors LLP [2026] EWHC 1395 (Ch), Master Clark, 17 June 2026.