Commercial partner apologises for judgment embargo breach

A partner at a commercial firm breached the embargo on a draft judgment by sending the result of an appeal to a ‘social’ WhatsApp group containing dozens of international lawyers.

Keith Oliver, an international fraud litigation specialist at Peters & Peters, has ‘expressed deep regret for his actions and provided a full apology to the court’, Lady Justice Carr said in a ruling.

Oliver represents a former partner at Swiss bank Banque Pictet in ongoing, high-value litigation concerning the alleged corruption of the former director general of Kuwait’s Public Institution for Social Security (PIFSS). Earlier this year, the Court of Appeal dismissed PIFSS’ appeal on jurisdictional issues in a ruling which was sent in draft on 18 January.

On that evening, Oliver attempted to send a message to a group chat used for confidential messages between senior partners at his firm, saying: ‘We just won in the CA on the Pictet case. Huge jurisdictional victory.’

‘However, in fact Mr Oliver did not send a message to his fellow partners as he had intended,’ Carr said. ‘Instead, by error, he sent the message to a quite different group of 41 international lawyers in a group sharing interests and created for social reasons.’

Oliver asked recipients to ignore his message and deleted it shortly after it was sent, but then sent the message to the group of five colleagues as he originally intended, which Carr said was also ‘undoubtedly’ a breach of the embargo.

She added: ‘Communication with such partners did not fall within the narrow purposes for which the draft judgment had been released. These breaches should have been self-reported at the time.’

Oliver told the court after solicitors for the appellant raised concerns that Kuwaiti news outlets had tweeted the outcome of the appeal the morning before judgment was handed down.

Carr said there is ‘no evidence of a link between Mr Oliver’s breach and publication in Kuwait via Kuwaiti/Arabic sources and media’, so ‘there must have been further breach’.

The judge added that ‘it is not clear who committed the breach’ and that it was not appropriate for the court to carry out ‘complex, expensive and probably ultimately fruitless enquiries into precisely who committed the breach(es), when and how’.

She noted that a recent ruling by the master of the rolls Sir Geoffrey Vos – published last month after Matrix Chambers revealed the result of a case online the day before judgment – ‘was not available at the time’ of Oliver’s breach. Carr said it was therefore ‘unnecessary for any further steps – apart from publication of this judgment – to be taken’.

But she added: ‘The facts of this matter confirm the anecdotal information to which the master of the rolls referred … namely that violations of court embargoes on publicising either the content or the substance of draft judgments have been becoming more frequent.’

She also emphasised the ‘need for utmost care in communicating the content or substance of a draft judgment in the digital age’, saying: ‘The use of electronic messaging requires greater, not lesser, attention to detail so as to ensure that errors of the type that occurred in this instance are not repeated.’