Rosling King's litigation tactics 'verging on the contumelious'

A High Court judge has angrily condemned the litigation tactics of a City law firm as ‘wholly unacceptable’ and ‘verging on the contumelious’.

The court heard that Rosling King was charged with drawing up a court order following a case management conference in a negligence claim brought by a centralised mortgage lender against its surveyors.

Mr Justice Edwards-Stuart said that three days after the CMC the claimant’s counsel sent a draft order to the defendant’s counsel that bore “almost no relation” to what he had directed.

He went on: “If a party is charged with drawing up an order it is the duty of its solicitors and counsel to produce a draft that fairly reflects what they think the judge decided or directed.

“Save for the most complicated directions, this seldom presents any difficulty. What Rosling King did in this case was to produce an order that reflected the directions that they or their clients would like to have, and not the directions that the court in fact ordered.

“That is wholly unacceptable: it is not just unreasonable, it is verging on the contumelious (to use an old fashioned, but completely apt, adjective).”

Delivering judgment in Webb Resolutions v JV Ltd (t/a Shepherd Chartered Surveyors) [2013] EWHC 509 (TCC), Edwards-Stuart J said what happened after the CMC was “unique” in his experience.

“In effect, the draft order provided for disclosure, exchange of witness statements and expert evidence on all issues in the case after which there was to be a further CMC to consider the precise scope of the issues to be determined at the first hearing.

“By contrast, the directions that I had given limited disclosure and the exchange of evidence to the assignment and lending issues.

“This was, as I have already explained, intended to avoid the costs of dealing with the valuation issues in case the judgment at the first trial disposed of one or more of the claims altogether.”

The judge said Rosling King’s “professed difficulty” in drafting the order was “nothing of the sort”.

He said their difficulty was in persuading the defendant’s solicitors, Reynolds Porter Chamberlain, to agree to an order which had not been made.

“RPC were wholly justified in resisting this and, indeed, their version of the order reflected what I had ordered as Rosling King, by their final and unwilling consent to it, must be taken to have accepted.”

Mr Justice Edwards-Stuart warned: “In my judgment, what occurred in this case must not happen again. Solicitors and counsel are to give effect to court orders; they are not to attempt to manipulate them to their own or their client’s perceived advantage.”

He directed the claimants to pay the defendants’ solicitors £6,925 in costs within two days.