The Solicitors Regulation Authority is to go to trial accused of breaching confidence rules in a case involving private documents that were handed to a whistleblower.
Rejecting the SRA’s request for summary judgment yesterday, Chief Master Marsh said the case should go to trial as a ‘full review of the legal principles’ was needed.
The SRA was answering a claim by solicitor Alexis Maitland Hudson that it breached its duties, failed to exercise reasonable care and preserve confidential information.
The case revolves around the disclosure of documents belonging to Maitland Hudson’s firm Maitland Hudson & Co.
In 2013, Peter Dempsey, a former member and compliance officer at the firm, sent the documents to the SRA because he had concerns about how the firm was being managed.
But in 2014, the SRA, at the request of Dempsey and his solicitors, sent the documents back to Dempsey to assist him in separate litigation with Maitland Hudson.
Dempsey denies Maitland Hudson’s allegations against him, stating that with one exception they have been withdrawn.
In his complaint against the SRA, Maitland Hudson claimed the ‘confidential and privileged nature of much of the confidential information would have been obvious to any reader and particularly to the SRA’.
The SRA’s application for a summary judgment was heard during a one-day hearing last month.
In yesterday’s ruling Marsh said that although there are complex issues of fact ’a careful and full review of the legal principles is also highly desirable’.
‘In the course of the hearing before me, which lasted one court day, the vast preponderance of the time was spent dealing with the principles of causation in relation to a common law duty of care and I do not consider that this important aspect of the case has had the review it warrants,’ Marsh added.
SRA fails to throw out ‘confidence breach’ claim
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