Solicitor to continue court battle against 'tyrannical' SRA

A solicitor who describes the SRA’s intervention regime as “tyrannical” has said he will appeal after the High Court rejected his claim that the SRA should pay damages after closing his firm.
 

Chris Gadd, whose Southampton personal injury firm Christopher Gadd Limited was shut by the SRA in 2009, protested outside the regulator’s offices in Redditch last year (see solicitorsjournal.com, 10 October 2011).

He has now attracted the support of the Society of Black Lawyers (SBL), which supplied him with a pro bono barrister for his High Court hearing last month.

Earlier this year, the SBL accused the SRA of being “institutionally racist” in a report for the Legal Services Board, and said it intervened disproportionately in small ethnic minority firms.

Speaking to Solicitors Journal, Peter Herbert, the chairman of the SBL, said he was “deeply concerned” about the treatment of white solicitors like Gadd, “who whistle blow and are then targeted in an abuse of process by the SRA”.

Herbert went on: “The measures taken against Chris were wholly disproportionate to what they should have been. It shows that the SRA is out of control.”

He said the SRA often relied on “very spurious” evidence.

“They intervene for one reason and then drop it completely. There is a willingness to rubber stamp interventions and a failure by the courts to scrutinise them when challenged. There have been some very poor decisions.”

Herbert said a “cottage industry” had been created, in which a lot of bigger firms made good money by acting in interventions into small firms.

“Small firms should be offered advice and assistance. Intervention should be a last resort.”

Herbert added that the SBL had been informed by the Legal Services Board informally during a meeting that the SRA was not “fit for purpose”.

Gadd said his case was “unique” because his own practice was “clean” and was only shut down because of his involvement in the two-partner practice WB Legal.

His case was heard by Mrs Justice Sharp at an ex tempore hearing. Gadd accused the SRA, represented by Bevan Brittan and Tim Dutton QC, former chairman of the Bar Council, of “employing its usual tactic of crushing the little man in court”.

He said he would appeal to the Court of Appeal, and “if necessary to the Supreme Court and on to Europe”.

He said that following an intervention, even when it was “totally unjustified”, solicitors had “effectively four working days” to get an application to the High Court.

“Virtually nobody in the profession knows this,” Gadd said. “When you are caught in the headlights of a completely out of the blue intervention and all your practice money has been frozen so that you cannot get advice, it is almost impossible to gather your thoughts in time to get your challenge in.

“How can a body get to make such a personally calamitous decision in secret without any opportunity for you to respond – a decision based on the often misleading and, at times, downright deceptive recommendations of an unqualified clerk?

“It is simply not right to have a system so weighted against solicitors, wrongly justified by the SRA as in the public interest, with innocent solicitors like me considered fair collateral damage. Making the decision behind closed doors and then reversing the burden onto the solicitor to get that decision changed is without precedent in any other area of law.”

A spokesman for the SRA said the regulator welcomed the decision of the High Court and “will contest any appeal by Mr Gadd”.