From start to finish - Interview with Patrick Allen

Patrick Allen was 27, not yet qualified and living in a squat when he hatched a plan with two solicitors to set up a law firm.

Nearly five decades later, Hodge Jones & Allen has grown from three men and a secretary above a tailor’s shop on Camden High Street in north London to a business employing 275 lawyers and staff, with annual turnover of £25m. The practice now occupies huge premises on North Gower Street, which boast a roof terrace and a basement bar complete with a grand piano and pool table.

Allen retires this month at 75. He can look back on a lifetime of legal practice in which he has been a tireless campaigner for justice, with the simple aim of using the law to improve people’s lives.

He acted in some of the most complex multi-party and personal injury cases of his time, including the 1987 King’s Cross fire, in which 31 people died, and the 1989 Marchioness pleasure boat disaster, which killed 51.

He led the HJA team that managed Gulf War illness claims for UK veterans and the inquest for the 1981 New Cross house fire. He also secured compensation for women who had been incarcerated in the so-called Magdalene laundries.

Daily grind

Allen’s life could easily have gone in a different direction. Born in Worthing in 1950 and brought up in Ealing, west London, Allen was the youngest of four children. At grammar school, he excelled in maths and science.

His mother worked as a secretary and his father was a sales director for an engineering company. Before taking up a place at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, to study engineering and economics, Allen spent a year working at Rolls-Royce in Derby, where he learned to use the milling and grinding machinery.

‘I realised this was probably not going to be the career for me,’ says Allen, who wanted to work ‘where the action is’, in London. ‘I’ve always been on the progressive left and wanted a career where I would be able to do something constructive for social good, that fitted in with my politics.’

Stuck in ‘a bit of a limbo’ at university, his ‘light-bulb moment’ came when a friend was arrested during a demonstration in 1971 and charged with assaulting a police officer. The friend had been protesting against a visit by the South Vietnamese ambassador who was addressing the Monday Club, a right-wing pressure group then linked to the Conservative party.

The charge was a ‘complete fabrication’, says Allen, who gave evidence in his friend’s defence. The friend was convicted by the magistrates but acquitted on appeal at the Crown court. ‘Suddenly,’ Allen recalls, ‘I could see the use of the law, fighting against injustice and working for social good – and I thought I could make a career out of this.’

After university, he spent a year travelling before studying for the Law Society exams at the College of Law in London. Then he did a stint of supply teaching while looking for a firm to train at.

Allen asked the recently formed Legal Action Group for a list of ‘progressive’ law firms, to which he wrote letters. He then received a call from the senior partner of Offenbach & Co, a ‘very trendy’ Mayfair practice, offering him a post.

His first year there was spent doing criminal law. ‘There was no supervision – you had your cases, no books, no computers – but by the skin of your teeth you worked it out,’ says Allen, who worked with young barristers including Helena Kennedy, Michael Mansfield and Rumpole of the Bailey creator John Mortimer.

Civil experience came in his second year, and with his articles nearing an end, he formed a plan to set up his own firm. He got Peter Jones, a salaried partner at Offenbachs, onside, and through his then girlfriend, barrister Maggie Rae, was introduced to Henry Hodge.

Hodge was working at the Child Poverty Action Group (he later married Labour politician Margaret Hodge, nee Oppenheimer, and became only the third solicitor High Court judge, dying in 2009; Jones left the firm in the mid-1980s to pursue an academic career).

‘Over two pints in the Freemasons Arms, in Covent Garden,’ the trio decided to set up the firm.

Hodge found a willing bank manager, Bert Enright of the Midland Bank in Camden. Enright agreed to lend each partner £3,500, subject to parental guarantees – and for Allen, a condition that he passed Part 2 of the Law Society exams. Allen has kept a photograph of Enright.

Completing his last exam, Allen recalls going to the new office with Hodge to paint its dingy woodchip walls magnolia. The firm opened its doors in September 1977. Three months later, on the day that he was admitted as a solicitor, Allen joined, adding his name to the brass plate.

Hodge framed their first £5 fixed fee, received under a scheme promoted by the Law Society to give clients half an hour of advice. ‘It was later stolen by a client!’ recalls Allen.

Initially specialising in criminal defence, family, housing, private client work and general litigation, mostly funded by legal aid and coming to the firm via local law centres, HJA grew. It developed teams in personal injury, clinical negligence and multi-party work.

Barrister Cherie Booth was briefed by the firm in her early days at the bar. In 1997 she opened its new office, and it was here that Sir Keir Starmer’s wife Victoria practised as a solicitor in the early 2000s.

Breaking through

Allen’s ‘breakthrough’ came in 1987, representing several families of those killed or injured in the King’s Cross fire. The Law Society asked him to be a spokesman for the claimant lawyers.

‘Suddenly, the entire nation’s media came to me to see what was going on,’ he says. ‘Having had no media training, within 24 hours I was giving a dozen interviews to radio and TV.’

Television news reports about London Regional Transport’s tardiness in admitting liability and offering compensation prompted immediate concessions from its chief executive and interim payments. For Allen, that demonstrated the importance of a media campaign to advance a client’s case.

Two years later, media attention helped speed up compensation in the wake of the sinking of the Marchioness pleasure boat by the dredger Bowbelle. But as Allen recalls: ‘We had a much tougher fight because the defendants weren’t particularly interested in the bad publicity.’

Allen instructed shipping barrister Charles Haddon-Cave, now a Court of Appeal judge, on whose advice he applied to the admiralty marshal, who handles the arrest and release of ships through the authority of the Admiralty Court, for a warrant to arrest the Bowbelle near Southwark Bridge.

‘Television cameras filmed me getting the warrant and arresting a sister vessel, plastering its wheelhouse with writs,’ which ‘did the trick to speed things up,’ remembers Allen.

At about the same time, he became involved in legal policy with the newly founded Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, later becoming its president.

An early win, he recalls, was persuading the lord chancellor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, to drop his plans to abolish costs in small personal injury cases. He managed to achieve this, Allen learned from then solicitor general Sir Nicholas Lyell, through ‘a couple of well-placed arguments in the Law Society Gazette’.

Costs wars

The profession had less success dissuading Mackay’s successor, Lord Irvine, from abolishing legal aid for personal injury claims, replacing it with conditional fee or ‘no win, no fee’ agreements and the recovery of success fees. ‘The insurers hated this and began the costs wars, refusing to pay costs,’ says Allen. This was an ‘acrimonious time’ when insurers ‘used their financial muscle and political influence to make life more difficult for claimants – and got some of the senior judges onside’.

Allen rejects the notion of a ‘compensation culture’ and the claims that lawyers are overpaid. He also believes that judge-led reforms intended to reduce cost and complexity – from lords Woolf and Jackson– have been a ‘disaster’ and achieved the opposite.

‘Judges don’t like dealing with costs and they don’t quite get it because they only see cases at the end and are not aware of the dynamics at the beginning and middle,’ he explains.

Most cases settle, but Allen argues: ‘The reforms were trying to arrange everything for a successful trial, which in Woolf’s case meant frontloading.’ The result, he notes, has been, ‘you have to do all this work to make sure the trial’s ready, which is a complete waste of time because you might have settled early without doing it’.

Jackson’s attempt to simplify costs, he adds, was ‘aimed at limiting the ability of claimants to recover their costs’, yet has increased costs and complexity.

Before the reforms, says Allen, ‘we had a very basic rule – reasonable costs were recoverable – with reasonableness policed by costs judges, who did a pretty good job’. Now, he laments, ‘reasonable costs are not necessarily recoverable’.

More widely, Allen is concerned about access to justice for ordinary people in what has become a ‘non-functioning judicial system’. Successive governments have ‘allowed the system to collapse’, he says, singling out the harm caused by Conservative lord chancellor Ken Clarke’s ‘willingness to embrace austerity and cut legal aid’.

In a flash

Aside from his articles at Offenbachs, Allen has ‘only ever had one job – this job – it’s been my whole life – in some ways it’s gone by in a flash’. It is, he reflects, ‘easier to start a business than to leave it’.

He would have retired earlier had the Covid pandemic not happened. The firm has repaid the loans taken out then, but Allen recalls a ‘nightmare’ period when the courts closed, leaving the litigation practice unable to resolve cases and therefore deprived of fees.

It was only once he had restructured the firm’s finances, with the help of Barclays Bank, that ‘I could see that the way was clear for me to move on’.

One of the biggest challenges of running a law firm, he explains, is cashflow. That is because cases are paid years in arrears, creating continual financial pressures: ‘Where do you find the working capital? You don’t draw profits – you just reinvest everything in the firm.’

Meanwhile, ‘a sympathetic bank manager’ has become harder to find. When the firm started, the local bank was happy to support a local business, remembers Allen. But these days, banks tell him they have ‘no appetite’ for law firms, especially those doing personal injury and no win, no fee work.

‘I keep pointing out that the cases we take have been very carefully risk-assessed – and when we do get paid, it will be by the government, NHS, local authority, an insurance company or big corporation, so there are no bad debts.’

Given all the challenges, ‘after 48 years it’s remarkable that we’ve survived’, says Allen, paying tribute to his ‘amazing clients and fantastic colleagues’.

Allen, who cycles to work every day, runs and lifts weights, is not planning to take it easy in retirement. He will continue his work with the Progressive Economy Forum, a thinktank he founded in 2018. He hopes to write his memoirs.

An accomplished pianist, he also aims to get a diploma, learn Italian, study philosophy, continue travelling, windsurfing, skiing and growing vegetables, and spend more time with family – especially his wife and two daughters.

HJA won’t be the same without the last of its founding fathers.

Catherine Baksi is a freelance journalist