A former president of Liverpool Law Society has been rebuked for allowing a client’s damages to be paid to serving prisoners.
Experienced solicitor Chris Topping, a consultant with Liverpool firm Jackson Lees Group, authorised his firm’s finance team to make 21 separate payments coming to £37,640, according to a Solicitors Regulation Authority decision notice.
He was found to have caused or allowed his firm’s client account to be used as a banking facility and in doing so breached the SRA accounts rules and one of the SRA principles.
Topping had successfully represented a client in a case against the Home Office for unlawful detention. The client, an asylum seeker with no leave to remain in the UK, was serving a lengthy prison sentence when he was awarded damages in January 2023. The client did not have a UK bank account and the firm was unable to open a personal injury trust account on his behalf because of his immigration and prisoner status. Topping had also been aware that his client had a long history of mental health difficulties, including a diagnosis of bipolar affective disorder and multiple detentions under the Mental Health Act.
The damages remained in the firm’s client bank account, and over the next two months the client gave instructions over the phone to Topping and six other members of staff to make payments to six individuals. The potential recipients were all, excluding the client’s mother, serving prisoners or people connected with serving prisoners.
The client later told police that he had been coerced into making the payments to prisoners.
The SRA issued a rebuke on the basis that Topping was an experienced solicitor with direct responsibility for his conduct who had allowed the client account to be used as a banking facility. He had ignored or failed to heed repeated warnings by the SRA and the decisions made by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal about this issue.
The regulator added: ‘Some public sanction is required to maintain standards and to acknowledge there has been a breach of regulatory requirements. A more serious sanction was not considered to be proportionate on the basis that it appears to have been an isolated case. The specific circumstances were unusual and the risk of repetition is low.’
Topping is well known on the local and national stage. He qualified as a solicitor in 1988 and is regarded as one of the leading practitioners in actions against the police. He advised clients damaged by the cover-up by South Yorkshire Police following the Hillsborough disaster and represented a couple in the European Court of Human Rights on the way in which police forces behave when obtaining a warrant. He was made the president of Liverpool Law Society in 2018.
