For readers of a certain age, today’s Mazur ruling from the Court of Appeal may well bring to mind the Bobby Ewing storyline of the 1980s TV soap Dallas.
Ewing had famously died after being run over by a car (no spoilers about who did it) but re-emerged from the shower many months later as if nothing had happened. The producers simply expected the viewers to swallow the line and go back to how things were before.
Presumably, the professional bodies and regulators who got themselves in such a tangle over the conduct of litigation will be hoping the profession has a similar attack of amnesia. The trouble is, the damage may be long-lasting.
Today’s Court of Appeal ruling is unquestionably a victory for CILEX, for the firms whose business models rely on unauthorised staff to conduct litigation, and for the clients who cannot afford to pay for higher-grade fee earners to run their cases.
Last year's judgment from Mr Justice Sheldon always appeared to be a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The objections of Julia Mazur to the involvement of an unauthorised person in her case were valid but fact-specific. Thanks in part to the shape-shifting nature of the SRA’s intervention, Sheldon was persuaded to make this case about a much wider issue which had terrible unintended consequences.
The subsequent seven months have been miserable for thousands of people unwittingly affected by the Sheldon ruling. Imagine having to tell your client of many years, who has placed their trust in you, that not only do you have to come off their case but in representing them you may have been acting unlawfully. Such cases were then passed on to solicitors no matter how recently qualified.
Then there was the added stress and cost of having to rapidly secure practising rights. Many legal executives had chosen that route to the profession on the basis that they had caring responsibilities or financial burdens that required a degree of flexibility. Those responsibilities had to be dropped or farmed out swiftly if careers were to be preserved.
CILEX will breathe a sigh of relief at the successful appeal but should expect no gratitude from its members. This was an organisation that advised legal executives they could conduct litigation, then quietly changed that advice when it appeared to be wrong. Mazur was a manifestation of this confused and mangled narrative.
The SRA, too, has been unable to provide definitive guidance and must now take responsibility for establishing – as the Court of Appeal indicates – the appropriate levels of supervision that authorised firms and solicitors must provide.
Perhaps the genie can be put back in the bottle, but the anger remains raw. If those organisations who helped to create this mess hope we can go on pretending the last few months didn’t happen, they may be disappointed.
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