Shand v Mishcon de Reya LLP: court strikes out reformulated conflict of interest claim

The High Court has struck out a reformulated claim brought by a litigant in person against Mishcon de Reya LLP, confirming that recasting the underlying allegations as a conflict of interest claim did not alter the court's earlier conclusion that the action was an abuse of process.

The judgement, handed down by Mr Justice Cotter on 11 September 2026, followed a consequentials hearing arising from an earlier judgement of 18 February 2026, in which the claimant, Martina Yvonne Shand, had her 2025 action against Mishcon and a second defendant firm struck out as totally without merit. That earlier judgement had not yet been formalised into an order when Ms Shand introduced new material, discovered through online research after the November 2025 hearing, concerning promotional videos of Mishcon co-hosting business events attended by Tony Pidgley, then chairman of the Berkeley Group and a director connected to the landlord in earlier litigation Ms Shand had brought.

Ms Shand subsequently reformulated her claim, dropping the original allegations of deliberately misleading advice and conspiracy in favour of a case that Mishcon had failed to disclose an own interest conflict, said to arise from the firm's business development relationship with Mr Pidgley, and that this had placed the fee earner handling her earlier litigation under pressure not to act against the interests of the Berkeley Group. She sought permission to amend her claim accordingly.

Revisiting the question in light of the reformulated pleading, the judge found his original conclusion unaltered. Applying the principle in Henderson v Henderson, as summarised by Lord Justice Clarke in Dexter v Vlieland-Boddy [2003] EWCA Civ 14 and considered in Aldi Stores v WSP Group plc, he held that the conflict of interest allegation could and should have been raised in Ms Shand's earlier 2019 action against Mishcon, which had been compromised by settlement. The material now relied upon had been publicly available online since 2014 or 2015 and could have been located through the same search Ms Shand carried out after the 2025 hearing at any point in the intervening years.

The judge went on to find, as an alternative basis for striking out the claim, that it disclosed no reasonable grounds even taken at its highest. He reiterated that a claim may be struck out where its factual basis is fanciful, notwithstanding the usual practice of assuming pleaded facts to be true, and confirmed that Mr Pidgley had never been a client of Mishcon. He rejected the inference that ordinary business development activity, conducted publicly by a partner at the firm, could have caused a fee earner to deliberately mishandle a client's litigation to protect the firm's relationship with a prominent commercial contact, describing the theory as a further iteration of an underlying conspiracy narrative that had evolved to meet each successive setback in over a decade of related litigation.

As a further alternative, the judge found the claim time-barred, rejecting an argument that Mishcon's alleged non-disclosure amounted to deliberate concealment under section 32 of the Limitation Act 1980, given the openness with which the underlying material had been published and Ms Shand's own acknowledged suspicions dating back to 2016.

The judge disallowed the amendments made without permission, dismissed the application to amend, and struck out the unamended claim as disclosing no reasonable grounds, as an abuse of process, and as statute-barred, declaring it totally without merit. He invited written submissions on costs, including whether they should be assessed on an indemnity basis, and confirmed that a request to report matters to the Solicitors Regulation Authority fell outside the court's jurisdiction to determine.