Former Law Society president David Greene faces a disciplinary hearing over allegations that he lied on oath after the Court of Appeal today struck out only part of the case against him.
Greene, senior partner at London firm Edwin Coe, succeeded in striking out former client David Davies’ complaint that correspondence between the pair would have led a county court judge to make a different decision in a dispute about some £7,000 in unpaid fees. However, the Court of Appeal rejected the remainder of Greene’s appeal, meaning he will now face a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal hearing.
The dispute goes back to 2008, when Davies’ company Eco-Power instructed Edwin Coe in a judicial review against Transport for London. The judicial review was dismissed and Eco-Power’s claim for damages was stayed, but Davies told the firm in 2009 that he wanted to pursue the damages claim, for which Edwin Coe opened a new file.
Davies later claimed that Eco-Power, not he, was the client and refused to pay Edwin Coe’s bill. The firm issued proceedings during which Greene told the court there had been ‘a break of a year’ in communication from 2008.
In 2012, District Judge Stewart ruled that Davies personally owed Edwin Coe £7,218.74 and, in 2016, the same judge rejected Davies’ application to set aside the earlier judgment based on the allegation that Greene misled the court – ruling that, if the emails between Greene and Davies in 2008 and 2009 were before him, it ‘would have made no difference’ to his previous decision.
Davies’ complaint was struck out by the SDT in 2019 but that decision was overturned by the High Court, which found Greene arguably gave evidence which was ‘not only misleading but deliberately so’.
Greene, who resigned as Law Society president to prevent the proceedings becoming a ‘distraction’, argued that the case against him is ‘an abusive collateral attack’ on the 2016 ruling that he did not give misleading evidence. His barrister Ben Hubble QC told the court in January that the complaint has ‘no prospect of success because the 2016 judgment is the answer’, arguing that Davies’ case ‘plainly brings the administration of justice into disrepute’.
But the Court of Appeal dismissed the majority of Greene’s appeal today, with Lord Justice Newey ruling that the rest of the SDT case should continue.
Greene had argued that Davies’ original complaint focused on whether District Judge Stewart had been misled, however Newey noted that ‘the word “misled” did not feature anywhere in Mr Davies’ original complaint’.
‘I do not read the original complaint as depending on District Judge Stewart having in fact been misled by the allegedly false evidence, regardless of whether it should be taken to have included an assertion to that effect,’ the judge said.
He referred to the High Court’s ruling, in which it held that ‘a lie that does not mislead the recipient is still a lie’, before adding: ‘A lie that does not in the event mislead may nonetheless involve “providing the court with misleading information”. Further, I do not think a solicitor need necessarily have known that his evidence was false for there to be scope for disciplinary proceedings.’
However, the court agreed with the SDT that to permit the ‘re-litigation’ of whether the correspondence between Green and Davies in 2008 and 2009 would have altered the district judge’s 2012 decision ‘would bring the administration of justice into disrepute’.
