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The Times

Tuesday, December 13 2016

Frances Gibb and Jonathan Ames bring this morning’s must-read of all things legal, including news, comment and gossip.

Today

  • Harassment barrister avoids disbarrment
  • Claim pits pensioners against mobility scooter maker
  • Estranged, independent daughter ‘should not have share of estate’
  • Law firm boost for hate crime application
  • Domestic corporate merger deals tumble
  • Human rights ebbing away in UK, says report
  • Comment: Address cohabitation rights before widening civil partnerships
  • The Churn: Leadership campaign kicks off at RPC
  • Blue Bag diary: Brace yourselves – law firm revamps website

Plus, see our plans for Brief Premium and archive of articles so far.

Tweet us @TimesLaw with your views.

 
Story of the Day

Harassment barrister avoids disbarment

A disgraced barrister who was convicted of stalking his lover – described by his wife as the “chavvy woman from Southampton” – has kept his career after being suspended from practice for only 12 months.

Jonathan Simpson, 48, and his wife Katherine Simpson, 49, a property lawyer, sent letters to the single mother’s family claiming that she had tried to get pregnant by him.

The affair abruptly ended in autumn 2014, but Simpson continued to try to contact the woman and was given a harassment notice and restraining order after he tried to call her from a payphone.

Simpson was convicted of stalking after a trial at Southwark crown court in June and given six months in jail suspended for a year, along with a year-long restraining order and a mental health treatment requirement. His wife was also convicted of stalking and was previously given a 12-month restraining order.

Yesterday, Simpson – who was called to the Bar at Gray’s Inn in 1993 and was suspended by the Bar Standards Board last July – appeared before the profession’s tribunals and adjudication service charged with professional misconduct. The tribunal heard that the barrister had already been “punished by the courts and suffered intense humiliation”.

Appearing for Simpson, Ian Stern, QC, of 2 Bedford Row chambers in London, said: “There is no public interest in removing those who have fallen from grace.”

The tribunal heard that Simpson was of previous good character and felt a “deep sense of shame, remorse and sorrow”. Stern said: ‘He showed himself to be a successful, hard-working and able practitioner, respected by colleagues and trusted by judges.”

Simpson’s wife, Katherine, who was convicted alongside her husband in June, faces a disciplinary hearing at the Solicitors Regulatory Authority in February.

 
 
News Round Up
Class action pits pensioners against mobility scooter maker

A mobility scooter manufacturer is facing a landmark competition claim this week from a pensioner that could leave it liable for £6 million in damages.

In a hearing that started yesterday before the Competition Appeal Tribunal, Dot Gibson, the general secretary of the National Pensioners Convention, has taken the next step in a claim that was launched in May 2016.

In one of the first cases brought under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 – which was implemented in October 2015 – Gibson argues that Pride Mobility Products overcharged some 30,000 customers for its scooters between 2010 and 2012. If the claim succeeds, class members could be entitled to compensation of up to about £200 each.

In a statement, Gibson said: “I’m applying to act as class representative to stand up for all those who paid too much for their mobility scooter. Mobility scooters help people get out of the house and live decent independent lives. If people have been overcharged, then that is wrong and should be put right.”

Chris Haan, a lawyer with Leigh Day, the London law firm acting for Gibson, said: “This case is the first class action in UK legal history. The new regime has the potential to significantly improve consumer rights in the UK. If Ms Gibson is successful, around 30,000 consumers will automatically be eligible for compensation, without having to sign up with lawyers or bring their own cases.”

Estranged, independent daughter ‘should not have share of estate’

A woman who had been independent her entire life should not be awarded up to a total of £163,000 from her mother’s will against the parent’s wishes to leave all her money to three animal charities, the UK’s highest court heard yesterday.

In a landmark challenge over the freedom of people to determine who benefits from their wills, the Supreme Court justices have been asked to rule in the latest round of a lengthy legal fight that began after Heather Ilott’s late mother Melita Jackson left most of her £486,000 estate to three animal charities.

Ilott, a mother of five from Great Munden, Hertfordshire, who has no pension and lived on state benefits, contested her mother’s will and was originally awarded £50,000 from the estate – increased last year by the Court of Appeal judges to £143,000 with potentially an additional award of £20,000.

Yesterday Blue Cross, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who were the main beneficiaries of the will, argued that the appeal judges “fell into error”.

They should not have decided to increase Ilott’s maintenance payout, which included £143,000 for her to buy her housing association home, the charities say.

Penelope Reed, QC, of 5 Stone Buildings, for the charities, said in her submissions: “The Court of Appeal had erred in its approach.”

The appeal judges, she added, had “failed to give weight to the fact the respondent [Ilott] had been independent of the deceased her entire adult life, had been estranged from her and had no expectation of benefiting from her estate.”

Reed went on to tell the justices that the appeal judges had failed “to give weight to the testamentary wishes of the deceased and failed to give any or due weight to the fact that Mrs Ilott had lived within her means for many years”.

Seven Supreme Court justices have been urged to overturn the Court of Appeal’s ruling – and either make an “appropriate” order for Ilott’s “provision” or restore the order made by a district judge in 2007 that the sum should be £50,000.

The justices are expected to reserve their decision at the end of the one-day hearing. Lawyers said that the hearing could have a profound impact on charity legacies, which total some £2 billion a year.

Law firm boost for hate crime application

Three City of London law firms played a crucial role in the creation of a prototype app that designers say will be a life-saver for those facing persecution for sexual orientation around the world.

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Hogan Lovells and Osborne Clarke advised a hackathon in London last week that produced a Snapchat tool aimed at witnesses and victims of hate crimes.

The prototype was created after a 48-hour competition organised by the case law information service LexisNexis that involved more than 40 coders, developers and designers. The app is designed to allow witnesses and victims of hate crime securely to upload evidence as images, videos and documentation. According to the organisers of the competition, that information will be stored in the “cloud” and then verified by lawyers and non-governmental organisations.

To protect user anonymity and safety, say the developers, the tool will be disguised as an indistinct contact within the app, making it difficult for anyone searching through the user’s phone to detect it.

Hogan Lovells, the transatlantic law firm, is sponsoring the next phase of development, with the designers aiming for a full launch within the next six months.

Téa Braun, legal director of the Human Dignity Trust, a group of international lawyers campaigning for human rights, which co-organised the hackathon, said: “There is need for a tool that allows lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, NGOs and allies to document and tell stories that might otherwise not have been told.”

Domestic corporate merger deals tumble

Domestic corporate mergers and acquisitions have tumbled by about half, according to recently released Whitehall figures that provided a mixed picture for City of London law firm deal rooms.

There were 72 completed acquisitions worth a total of £3.2 billion involving UK companies buying domestic counterparts during the third quarter of the year, the Office for National Statistics said. That compared with 152 deals worth £7.2 billion in the previous quarter.

However, in a boost for transaction specialist lawyers in the Square Mile, the year-on-year figure showed a considerable increase. In the third quarter of last year there were 60 deals worth only £1.2 billion.

Lawyers will also be relatively encouraged by the combined value of domestic and cross-border deals, which increased by nearly 3 per cent in the third quarter compared with the previous quarter to a total of £34 billion.

Human rights ebbing away in UK, says report

Human rights are in danger of ebbing in the UK, analysts warned yesterday, pointing to a rise in hate crime and an erosion of the social security safety net that has created an “uncertain future for society’s most vulnerable and marginalised”.

Inequality around access to healthcare and education are two significant threats to human rights in Britain, according to a report to the UN from the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission.

The report, which was released yesterday, calls on the UK government and the devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales to implement a range of proposals.
The commission calls for a “detailed analysis” of spending decisions on disabled people and children. It also calls for reforms to ensure that “all unaccompanied and separated children entering the UK are assigned an independent guardian to help protect their interests”.

The commission also says that a time limit of 28 days should be set for immigration detention and calls on the government to end the detention of pregnant women.
According to Lorna McGregor, the commissioner, the report shows “a worrying lack of progress with society’s most vulnerable and marginalised in danger of being left behind”.

In Brief

European citizens living in UK ‘should remain under jurisdiction of EU law after Brexit’ – Daily Telegraph

King & Wood Mallesons cannot guarantee wage payments after January – The Lawyer

Shares plummet as law firm owner issues profit warning – Law Gazette

 
Byline
Comment

Address cohabitation rights before widening civil partnerships Maeve O'Higgins

Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan are waiting for the Court of Appeal to rule on their quest for opposite-sex couples to have the right to civil partnerships.

While I am not unsympathetic to the couple’s desire to be able to choose between marriage and civil partnership, there are more important situations requiring reform, notably the lack of legal rights for cohabiting couples, that urgently need to be addressed.

Cohabitees are the fastest-growing family type in the UK. Unlike married couples or civil partners, in the event of relationship breakdown a cohabitee has no automatic right to a share of family assets – however long the couple have lived together and whether or not they have children – and no right to financial support from the economically stronger partner.

If a cohabitee dies without leaving a will, the surviving cohabitee has no automatic right to a share of the dead partner’s estate. The lack of rights can lead to extreme financial hardship.

Steinfeld and Keidan have been living together for six years and have a child. They regard marriage as outdated and want a civil partnership which, as the trial judge in the High Court put it, “they consider reflects their values and gives due recognition to the equality of their relationship”. Under current law, only same-sex couples can choose between civil partnership or marriage.

The Civil Partnership Act 2004 gave same-sex couples the same legal rights as married couples at a time when they could not marry. In 2014 the law changed, with the introduction of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013.

However, civil partnerships for same-sex couples have not been abolished and the government remains undecided over whether to extend civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples.

This couple argued before the Court of Appeal last month that the current law is incompatible with Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights – which prohibits discrimination, including on the ground of sexual orientation – in conjunction with the right to family life and private life, under Article 8.

The judge dismissed the couple’s claim, saying that the difference in treatment of same-sex and opposite-sex couples “does not infringe a personal interest close to the core of the right to family life … still less the right to private life”, and if she was wrong about that, the legal difference was justified in the short-term because the government is evaluating the impact of the 2013 act on civil partnerships before deciding whether to introduce new legislation.

Opposite-sex couples did not suffer discrimination by the hiatus because they can achieve identical rights to same-sex couples by marrying, the court said.

Maeve O’Higgins is a partner at Moon Beever, a law firm in London and Essex

 
 
Blue Bag

Brace yourselves – law firm revamps website

It must be the ageing process, but can anyone remember an era when law firms named themselves after the two or three founding partners, nipped to the brass plaque engravers, slapped the result above the door – and that was that?

“Rebranding” was not a word in the profession’s lexicon. On the contrary, the unfaltering stability of the firm’s name and solid appearance was a marketing point in itself. Those days are gone. And to prove the point, the other day Lewis Silkin, a City of London law firm, distributed a gushing statement of more than 500 words announcing that it had a “revamped brand” and had launched an “enhanced website”.

The firm’s online rebirth alone sounds as though it rivalled Nasa’s first journey to the moon. “The launch of the new site marks the culmination of this 18-month initiative that includes refreshing and refocusing the firm’s visual identity in support of its long-term business strategy, and reflects its unique culture, value proposition and reputation as innovative, collaborative and specialist.”

Is there a law firm senior partner in London or New York who simply markets a practice on the slogan: “We provide top-flight educated legal advice”? If so, it’s not Ian Jeffery, Lewis Silkin’s chief executive officer and partner.

“We have always been a firm which prides itself on doing things differently and being ahead of the curve,” says Jeffery, clutching his copy of the Ladybird Book of Marketing Jargon. “The transformation of our brand and website also clearly reflect this, representing the unique personality of our business, acutely focused areas of specialism and reputation for practical, commercial advice highly valued by our clients.”

To be fair on Jeffery, he is by no means the first senior partner forced to spout marketing platitudes on the refresh of a website.

 
 
The Churn

A run down of the big partner and team moves this week

Leadership campaign kicks off at RPC

RPC, the City of London insurance and media litigation law firm, has launched a leadership election to replace Jonathan Watmough, the managing partner.

The firm announced yesterday that the vote would be held late next month with the winner taking the reins at the beginning of February. Holding the fort until the firm’s partners have cast their ballots are Tim Anderson, the head of the commercial department, and James Miller, head of insurance, who are “de facto joint managing partners”.

Watmough is an RPC man-and-boy lawyer. He joined the firm as trainee in 1991, became a corporate partner in 1998, and was elected chairman of the management board in 2006. He has been managing partner since 2008.

 
 
Quote of the Day

“At a febrile time when the tabloids are calling judges enemies of the people, not one City lawyer has spoken out in defence of the bench. The Bar was furious, and it was vocal … From the City firms there was an unedifying silence. In fact … the silence was an absolute disgrace.”