The role of the Legal System in Failures - The UK Post Office Scandal (Part 3)

An exercise in highly paid lawyers dancing on the head of a pin. We deep dive into the roles the law, the lawyers and the courts played in this scandal.

This wasn’t a case of a few bad apples, the whole system was stacked against the Subpostmasters. The system silenced, suppressed and hid information and nothing like justice was achieved.

At some point the overriding duty to the court owed by lawyers got lost in a fog of protecting the client at all costs. The barrister acting for the Sub-postmasters, after reading internal Post Office legal advice from 2014, said “In my almost 30 years’ experience at the bar I have never come across information that has been so electrifying. It almost caused my teeth to fall out when I read it.”

It took 20 years and a class action for Tracy Felstead to recover a mere £17,000 pounds for her wrongful conviction in 2001.

And this story is far from over yet. The Solicitors Regulatory Authority is a core participant in the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry which is probing the in house and external lawyers for potential wrongdoing.

Source Material

Nick Wallis, ‘The Great Post Office Scandal’, 2021, Bath Publishing.

Paul Marshall, ‘Failed Justice - how commercial interest displaced the interests of justice in the Post Office case’, 30 March 2022, Queen’s University Belfast, Institute of Legal Studies

Disclaimer This podcast is for reference purposes only.  It does not constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon as such.  You should always obtain legal advice about your specific circumstances.  The views expressed in these podcasts are the speakers' own.  They should not be taken as recommendations of the Society of Construction Law Australia

 

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