Solicitors fined £20,000 for sending intimidating letters

How do you know how much profit Davenport Lyons made from this? A three-month suspension, a fine and a costs order is anything but "miniscule" for solicitors who write letters of claim in accordance with their clients' instructions.

Offering to settle a claim at a level which encourages acceptance is hardly "cynical" - it's what good lawyers do every day.

This decision is an absolute disgrace.

If they do not win their appeal it will be a further disgrace-but as there isn't a proper appeal system in place for solicitors, no surprise. Probably a breach of human rights.

If you start making exceptions from the law for classes of people, in this case the file sharing children of the middle classes, you are really on the road to perdition.

This undermines the rule of law and before long other pressure groups will step up demanding exemptions from statute and common law.

Who is next for special kid glove treatment? Journalists who listened to voicemail? Politicians who cheat on expenses? Bankers who misold products?

I can assure you that two classes of people will not get special treatment. Workers at Tesco who are sacked for taking too much time off for being ill and solicitors and their families who face ruin because of SDT costs orders or costs arising from or relating to SRA interventions. Strangely enough the people most prominent in establishing the file sharing exemption to the law were a former head of legal at Tesco and those unaccountable police at the SRA. The only unaccountable police in this country.

From now on all solicitors must act as unpaid judges for their own clients. They must first decide if their client's proposed action will upset people, or more accurately upset powerful people and they must tell their own client to stop, if this is the effect of the proposed action.

I hope the judiciary realise that their role has been undermined by this action.

This is just dangerous. Solicitors are to show deference to the protected. Who will be protected next. The murdering son or daughter of a senior politician?

To think that we were once the envy of the world for our fair legal system. If we lose that reputation, we will lose more than just money. We will lose a reputation built over centuries. O Tempora, O Mores. How many of our judges, barristers and solicitors understand this phrase?

I don't see how FACT could intervene in any appeal. Is it even certain that there will be an appeal? The Administrative Court is usually very reluctant to overturn decisions of the SDT, so an appeal might not achieve much more than an increase in the costs payable to the SRA.

What is remarkable about this case is that the solicitors were adopting the same approach as that adopted in the Digital Economy Act 2010, which also works on the assumption that the subscriber to the internet connection is the person who committed the unlawful file sharing using that connection. The solicitors cannot sensibly be criticised for adopting the same assumption as that adopted in the DEA. So, what exactly did they do wrong? The answer appears to be that they wrote some letters which the SDT thought were too strong. Given that there was no finding of dishonesty or bad faith, it is difficult to see how writing letters which were too strong merits a three-month suspension, a £20,000 fine and a six-figure costs order.

A much more constructive (and cost-effective) way to have dealt with this would have been for the SRA to issue guidance to those members of the profession who are instructed to deal with claims of unlawful file sharing. After this decision of the SDT, no solicitor is going to want to go near such work. That may suit some sections of the public, but it is not the role of the SDT to make decisions which prevent the victims of alleged copyright infringement from taking steps to obtain redress.