A judge has publicly lambasted a prominent solicitor-advocate family specialist for an ‘extraordinarily high degree of ill judgment’ over his advice on a divorce settlement.
In a judgment from February published this week, His Honour Judge Edward Hess set out that the parties in divorce proceedings had agreed to effectively end litigation in 2021 with an approved consent order.
But in a paragraph entitled ‘The arrival on the scene of Mr Burrows’, the judge said the wife took on a different focus after August 2022 when her new solicitor David Burrows ‘expended his considerable energies’ in trying to overturn the order.
The judge said Burrows, who was admitted in 1973 and has written articles and books on family law, made a series of suggestions and applications that were ‘bizarre’ in his legal and judicial experience. An application to set aside the consent order, based on the husband allegedly having concealed financial matters from the court, was strongly objected to by the husband’s solicitors. Burrows expressly declined the court’s invitation to apologise to the solicitors for the allegations that they deliberately misled the court.
The wife, having been issued a set aside notice for failing to adhere to court directions, then filed a statement in essence accepting there was no material non-disclosure.
The judge suggested this may have been an apology but noted that ‘in a broader sense I have picked up little sense of regret or repentance from Mr Burrows for pursuing the issue in the way he did’.
Further proceedings followed, including an application by the husband for a limited civil restraint order against his wife.
Addressing the application to set aside the 2021 order, the judge said that lawyers on both sides had not previously felt it was wrong or unfair and it was not until the involvement of Burrows that the wife was ‘steered’ towards challenging it.
‘It strikes me very clearly that Mr Burrows’ headline complaint, whatever its technical merit, has been an expensive and pointless legal exercise,’ added the judge. ‘For me it is baffling as to why he should be steering the wife into doing what she is doing.’
The application was ultimately dismissed as out of time and the judge put on record that the attempt was totally without merit. He proposed to deal with the issue of costs and the limited civil restraint order at a hearing this month, the outcome of which has yet to be reported. The judge added that the bills raised by Burrows would be a ‘significant sum’ given that he charged £320 plus VAT per hour and he had spent many hours on the case. The husband’s extra costs incurred dealing with proceedings after August 2022 came to almost £60,000.
Burrows, who continues to write about the law but does not have a practice of his own, told the Gazette that his client had wanted to have the consent order set aside as it had failed to apply the law and did not pay attention to the welfare of the couple’s still-dependent children. The plan had been to make a charge against a seven-figure lump sum awarded to the husband. Burrows disputed whether the judge had the power to dismiss the wife’s claim.
