How did the English judiciary stoop so low?

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Created on Thursday, 27 September 2012 00:00

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How did the English judiciary stoop so..?

Legal tourists are making a mockery our legal system

Nick Cohen

The UK may have "entered into a double-dip recession", gushes the latest issue of Legal Business, a glossy magazine for corporate lawyers, "but the UK's top law firms continue to post record growth and trend-busting profits."

So they do. The upper end of the law is top-heavy with money. Jonathan Sumption QC earned the largest barrister's fee ever when he pocketed a reported £5m for representing Roman Abramovich in his fight with Boris Berezovsky. Profits at the richest 100 London law firms hit more than £5bn for the first time last year. The richest seven paid their partners more than £1m each.

In Tuscan second homes the chianti is flowing because oligarchs and global corporations cannot get enough of the English legal system.

Speaking last year to Clifford Chance, whose partners brought in £1.3bn in 2011, the then justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, accepted that the legal business had "felt itself to be something of an overlooked Cinderella in its treatment by government" – an odd description to use when partners in City law firms resemble no one so much as the Ugly Sisters, but I'll let it pass. The coalition now recognised the money to be made from litigation and wanted to push English legal services into the emerging markets. "The UK may no longer be able to boast that it is the workshop of the world," Clarke declared. "But the UK can be lawyer to the world." In the 1990s and 2000s, government thought that financial services offered a future for post-industrial Britain. Now, it sees legal services as our saviour.

Ministers' ambition is embodied in the Rolls Building, which curves like a luxury liner near Fetter Lane in the City. The new home for commercial courts has none of the fustiness of the old, neogothic high court on the Strand. Opened last year at a cost of £300m, it looks like the headquarters for a fashionable tech firm: all glass and steel, and with a central atrium from where a spiral staircase twists up towards the sky.

The Ministry of Justice hopes it will help Britain become the "largest specialist centre for the resolution of financial, business and property litigation anywhere in the world" and on the face of it, there seems little to object to in that. I have many criticisms of the judiciary, but I have never entertained the notion that an English judge would take a bribe or succumb to pressure from the state. You cannot say the same of judges in Moscow, New Delhi or Beijing. The incorruptibility of the judiciary and the work ethic of the lawyers ensure that more international commercial disputes take place in London than in any other city in the world. And of course we need whatever taxes the lawyers' accountants condescend to pass to the Revenue.

"Wimbledonisation" is an ugly term business writers reach for on these occasions. Andy Murray apart, we may not have great tennis players, they say, but in commerce, as in sport, we can still host the best foreign players.

Yet there are already signs that this trend in English law will be as great a disappointment as it was in English finance. Even Abramovich's solicitors accepted that the sceptical may wonder what a dispute about the division of the loot from the old Soviet empire had to do with us.

The British taxpayer saw no direct benefit. Mrs Justice Gloster began hearing the Abramovich case on 3 October 2011. The proceedings lasted until 21 December 2011. She considered her verdict until 31 August 2012, and still has months more to spend writing her judgment.

For this service, the public purse received next to nothing. High Court and Court of Appeal users pay £1,090 for a trial hearing regardless of its length. The Ministry of Justice suggested last year that it might raise the price of High Court and Court of Appeal cases lasting more than 10 days to £10,900, but that would still not cover the costs of a fresh battle between the oligarchs and in any case nothing has been done.

Like the National Theatre and the House of Windsor, the law is subsidised by the taxpayer because it brings in the tourists, but in this instance they are the wealthiest tourists on the planet who can afford to pay their way.

Beyond the freeloading lies an existential question: who is the law for? Sitting in London, it is not too fanciful to imagine the legal system of England and Wales detaching itself from the peoples of England and Wales.

Its best lawyers no longer want to work for them, because they cannot afford their fees. Its judges cannot hear their disputes for months because they are tied up hearing the disputes of plutocrats.

As we already know, the government's cuts to legal aid mean that ministers are deliberately placing the poorest beyond the law. On matters of vital concern – housing, debt, benefit claim – they will have no access to justice.

Meanwhile, ministers tell the middle classes to settle their disputes by arbitration, which is a reasonable way for reasonable people to reach an agreement, but if one of the parties is unreasonable the middle classes still need judges and lawyers to intervene. They are becoming harder to find. A senior judge told me that he knew British corporate lawyers who had never represented a human being. Soon we will have British corporate lawyers who have never represented a British company either.

With the exception of a few judges, there is no resistance to the law's embrace of bling. After pocketing his Russian gold, Sumption was elevated from being a working barrister to a seat in the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land.

Like Peter Bazalgette, who made a fortune from broadcasting trash and has been rewarded with the chairmanship of the Arts Council, Sumption found that the modern British state celebrates the accumulation of money by whatever means necessary. The richer you are the more deserving of honours you become.

The credit crunch was so severe in Britain because the Wimbledonisation of finance ended when the crash forced all the foreign banks the government had encouraged to come to these islands to head home and take their credit for families and businesses with them.

In the legal world, it will end when the people realise that the law of the land is the law of everybody's land but theirs.

Source: The Observer UK, 23 September 2012