‘Generally dishonest’ lawyer made false claims and lied on CV

A senior lawyer lied on her CV and then lied again in the course of making three personal injury claims, a court has ruled.

His Honour Judge Bird said Michelle Scully, now known as Michelle Atherton, was a ‘generally dishonest person’ who fabricated the extent of her injuries. She was ordered to pay the defence costs of all three claims after being found to have been fundamentally dishonest.

The judge, sitting at Manchester County Court, further ordered a copy of his ruling to be sent to the Law Society, to CILEX and to each of the firms for which Scully listed as working in her LinkedIn profile.

The court heard that Scully was a passenger in three separate car accidents between 2015 and 2016. She claimed £65,000 for serious injuries, including psychological damage, for each incident, and was supported by expert medical reports.

Part of the claimant’s narrative was that she had been unable to return to the gym because of her injuries, but between October and December 2016 records showed she attended Pure Gym 47 times. A personal trainer at the gym recalled in evidence that she was able to lift heavy weights before and after her accidents.

Scully was familiar with the litigation process, having worked with law firms since 2009. She was client account manager and complex fraud and credit hire technician at Hill Dickinson before joining Carter Law as head of litigation in October 2015. In 2018 she began to work for Bond Turner as a litigation executive and was a senior member of staff.

The Bond Turner website had stated that Scully was studying CILEX level 6 and her LinkedIn profile held herself out as having gained five A-levels at grades A or B.

In cross examination she accepted that she had only one A-level and had passed no CILEX examinations. She was instead ‘studying’ CILEX level six in the sense that she had borrowed the textbooks and was looking at them.

The judge said Scully’s justification for this was ‘wholly unimpressive’ and that she gave evidence to the court ‘without any regard for the truth guided only by what she perceived to be her own interests’. She resigned from Bond Turner the day before a disciplinary meeting to discuss her misleading CV.

The judge found Scully deliberately failed to give medical experts the full extent of her recovery, including not mentioning that she had completed an ascent of Ben Nevis (pictured above) and the Yorkshire Three Peaks. She had also made up a story alleging blackmail by her gym trainer.

Following the ruling, Alex Wilkinson, partner at HF and head of the firm’s technical fraud team, instructed by Admiral Insurance in respect of two of the three accidents, said: ‘Michelle Scully thought she could use her knowledge of the claims process to dishonestly obtain compensation for accidents that, in fact, caused her no injuries. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the lies she had told about her qualifications throughout her legal career, potentially denying someone else a job that they would otherwise have secured, are scandalous.’