Fine for solicitor who sent “threatening” Covid letters to schools

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Vaccine: Solicitor told schools not to facilitate jabs

A solicitor who sent “threatening” letters to at least 244 secondary schools, telling them they could be at risk of criminal or civil liability for implementing Covid measures, has been fined £2,500.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) found that Lois Yvonne Bayliss was not clear that she was not acting under client instructions and not writing as a solicitor.

The letters warned schools against requiring face-coverings, carrying out lateral flow tests and facilitating vaccinations. They concluded: “We will continue to observe your response to this polite letter should we not hear from you to confirm your intentions towards swift compliance.”

The SDT said the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) agreed that Ms Bayliss had not drafted the letters herself, but she approved the contents and allowed the use of “her firm’s name, style and logo” on the emails to the schools.

For schools receiving the emails “completely out of the blue and in circumstances where they were no doubt contending with an unprecedented situation”, it was difficult to see how they could have been “perceived otherwise than representing an implied threat of some type of action, be that civil or criminal”.

The tone of the letters “was not merely passive-aggressive but threatening in nature with the final paragraph containing an element of menace and intimidation which belied its entreaty that it was a ‘polite letter’”.

The tribunal heard that Ms Bayliss, admitted in 2006, ran Broad Yorkshire Law in Sheffield.

She denied all the allegations against her, arguing that she “wanted to protect children from harm, and protect badly informed and confused teachers from the risk of criminal or civil prosecution” – and had no other motive than this.

It was accepted that Ms Bayliss had a “genuine belief”, based on scientific evidence, that the measures were harmful to children.

The SRA, which received 19 complaints about her letters, remained “neutral” on this evidence.

The SDT found that Ms Bayliss acted with a lack of integrity, noting “the power imbalance inherent within the letters not only vis-à-vis solicitor/lay person but also in what the respondent chose not to include in her letters i.e. that she was not writing as a solicitor; that she was not acting under client instructions; that no proceedings (whether criminal or civil) were within her contemplation, and that she would not be following up to see whether the recipient had complied.

“A solicitor acting with integrity would have been very clear about these matters and not permitted any confusion to arise in the recipient’s mind.”

In such circumstances, the SRA was entitled to interfere with Ms Bayliss’s freedom of expression “in pursuance of a legitimate objective, namely, maintaining the good standing of the solicitors’ profession in the eyes of the public”.

But the threats, albeit implied, were not misleading, as alleged, the SDT went on. They were “clear to a lay person”, i.e. ‘cease and desist, or run the risk of incurring some form of legal liability’.

The SDT took no view on the science, as it had not required any expert evidence – its focus was on Ms Bayliss’s conduct. This meant it could not say whether the letters’ content was itself misleading.

It did not uphold allegations that Ms Bayliss had encouraged others to send letters or sent letters to GP surgeries.

In deciding sanction, the tribunal said there was “no evidence of actual harm caused to anyone”, the only harm being “the confusion and anxiety experienced by the recipients of what would have appeared to a lay person as a ‘solicitor’s letter’, with all that would conjure in the mind of an unsuspecting lay person”.

Ms Bayliss had co-operated with the regulator, although she had shown “little if any insight into her conduct”, while the harm to the reputation of the profession was “not insignificant”.

The SDT concluded that Ms Bayliss “had fallen far short of the standards of integrity and probity expected of a solicitor and in the circumstances the level of seriousness of the misconduct was high”.

But it decided to set the fine at the lower end of the band for conduct assessed as “moderately serious”.

The SRA claimed £59,700 in costs, claiming this was a “complex case with documentation running to over 9,000 pages”, mostly supplied by Ms Bayliss.

The solicitor had not submitted a statement of means but there was “open-source information” indicating that she had raised £43,000 in a GoFundMe campaign to pay for her legal costs.

Counsel for Ms Bayliss said she had started the GoFund Me campaign at a time when her own legal costs exceeded £43,000.

Reflecting the fact that not every matter had been proved, it ordered her to pay costs of £30,000.

Last month, a solicitor who sent overly aggressive and legally inaccurate letters before action to a GP surgery and government agency as part of a campaign against the Covid vaccine was fined £15,000.