A claimant firm which represented a woman who lied about her injuries should not have to pay a wasted costs order, the High Court has ruled.

In Williams-Henry v Associated British Ports & Anor Mr Justice Ritchie rejected the assertion that national firm Hugh James had been unreasonable or negligent in the way it handled the personal injury claim.

Earlier this year, Ritchie found that the claimant, Kirsty Williams-Henry, had told repeated lies about the scope of her injuries to seek £2.5m in damages. Her claim was found to be worth £600,000 but Williams-Henry received nothing on the basis she had been fundamentally dishonest.

The successful defendant then turned its attention to Hugh James, applying for a £300,000 wasted costs order against the firm. It was submitted that the claimant lawyers had pursued a ‘speculative case’, failed to cross check what the claimant told it against source documents and failed to advise her on the risk that she would be found fundamentally dishonest.

Hugh James rejected the assertion it should have ‘dumped’ the claimant before the trial based on the information that had come to light. Continuing to represent a brain-damaged claimant, who asserted that she had an honest claim, was neither unreasonable nor improper and certainly not negligent, the firm said.

On the alleged disclosure failing, the judge noted that this centred on Williams-Henry’s social media accounts which suggested she was not as injured as she claimed. But he rejected that these were relevant to standard disclosure. Ritchie added: ‘Are solicitors to spend days trawling through hundreds of thousands of TikTok posts, texts, WhatsApp messages and Twitter feeds (aka X) to harvest them, arrange them, delete personal ones, then disclose them to insurers?

‘Which issues would each post go to? Would masters allow the huge costs of this in every case in costs budgets? Would insurers wish to pay such costs routinely? Until dishonesty is alleged, I do not see the relevance of these.’

Taking into account Williams-Henry’s inability to disclose what actually went on, the judge assumed that the solicitors acted on instructions and he give them the benefit of any doubt. Even if the firm had known, for example, that the claimant had been on holiday, this had not caused wasted costs.

Ritchie added it was neither negligent nor unreasonable to continue to represent Williams-Henry in a case involving a moderately severe brain injury which had been running for years and where liability had been admitted. This was especially the case given that the defendant had made offers to settle.

‘The decision whether to terminate [the conditional fee agreement] or not to do so was a human and commercial one for the firm, not a matter of professional regulation or a matter for the court or the applicant to comment upon or criticise… [the firm] is not to be held to have acted [unreasonably] simply because it acted for a party who pursued a claim which failed and was probably doomed to fail.’

The wasted costs application was dismissed.

 

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