Accidents: Judge rejected evidence of injuries
A personal injury fee-earner lied about injuries she suffered in three car accidents, as well as about her academic achievements and professional status, a circuit judge has ruled.
Finding her claims fundamentally dishonest, His Honour Judge Bird in Manchester said he was “minded” to report Michelle Scully (married name Atherton) to the Law Society, CILEX and the law firms she previously worked for.
Ms Scully told Legal Futures that she was “bitterly disappointed” by the ruling and would appeal.
She brought claims valued at £65,000 over purported soft tissue and particularly psychological injuries, as well as tinnitus, suffered as a passenger in three separate car accidents in 2015 and 2016.
The judge described her as “familiar with the litigation process”, having worked for law firms since 2009, according to her LinkedIn profile. This said she had no qualifications beyond five A-Levels but, in cross-examination, she accepted that she only had one.
The profile said Ms Scully worked for defendant firms Keoghs and Hill Dickinson between 2009 and 2015 before becoming ‘head of litigation’ at now-defunct Bolton firm Carter Law. In October 2018, she began to work at Bond Turner as a litigation executive.
Bond Turner’s website had described her as having “over 15 years’ experience in handling litigated personal injury cases for both defendant and claimant practises”, and that she was studying for the CILEX level 6 qualification.
HHJ Bird said: “She told me that she was unaware that her LinkedIn profile (taken from her CV) was misleading until shortly before the trial. She also accepted that she had at no time been in a position to take the CILEX level 6 examination and had passed no CILEX examinations at all.
“She told me that she was ‘studying’ CILEX level 6 in the sense that she had borrowed the textbooks and was looking at them.”
Even her resignation letter written to Bond Turner was “disingenuous”, he went on. “The day after it was written she was due to attend a disciplinary meeting in respect of what I have found to be her deliberately misleading CV.
“She was well aware that she would (almost certainly) be summarily dismissed and pre-empted that obvious outcome in a further dishonest way.”
HHJ Bird said he was “very clear” that Ms Scully was “a wholly unreliable witness who gave evidence without any regard for the truth guided only by what she perceived to be her own interests.
“She made things up when asked difficult questions and on occasion gave patently false answers.”
He concluded that she “deliberately lied about her academic achievements on her CV and LinkedIn profile”, and about her professional status.
“Whilst it was plain to her that any reasonable reading of those words would lead to the conclusion that she had progressed through CILEX examinations and would sit the level 6 exam, she had simply acquired the level 6 textbooks and was reading them.”
She also “deliberately lied” in an effort to discredit one of the drivers in whose car she had an accident, whose evidence damaged her case.
She also “deliberately misled” the medical experts who examined her – the evidence disproved her claim that she had not been able to go back to the gym since the injuries – and he labelled her “a generally dishonest person”, rejecting her account of the injuries “in its entirety”.
The judge found each claim to be fundamentally dishonest, thereby disapplying qualified one-way costs shifting.
He said, as a preliminary view ahead of submissions, that he was minded to order Ms Scully to pay each of the defendants’ costs.
HHJ Bird added: “I am minded to order that a copy of this judgment be sent to the Law Society, to CILEX and to each of the firms for whom the claimant is shown to have worked in her LinkedIn profile.”
In a statement to Legal Futures, Ms Scully said: “I am bitterly disappointed by the ruling. I never claimed my injuries were life changing. I did not take a single day off work and accepted that I have made an almost complete recovery. I am pursuing an appeal.
“The judge concentrated almost entirely on collateral issues which had little relevance to my injuries. He ignored the evidence of five experts, whom the defendants did not challenge, and the clinical records which clearly demonstrated my injuries.”
Alex Wilkinson, a partner and head of HF’s technical fraud team, was instructed by Admiral Insurance in respect of two of the three accidents. He said: “Michelle Scully thought she could use her knowledge of the claims process to dishonestly obtain compensation for accidents that, in fact, caused her no injuries.
“As if that wasn’t bad enough, the lies she had told about her qualifications throughout her legal career, potentially denying someone else a job that they would otherwise have secured, are scandalous.”
Ian Price, head of claims fraud at Admiral, added that they decided to investigate after its policyholders reported that Ms Scully was uninjured in the two accidents they were involved in.
Bond Turner director Samantha Moss said that, after it discovered “that we had been deliberately misled, we invited Ms Scully to a disciplinary meeting, as the judgment confirms. She resigned before that meeting took place”.
The firm has reported Ms Scully to the Solicitors Regulation Authority and was fully cooperating in the investigation against her.
“There is simply no place in the legal profession for dishonest people or conduct and the publicity serves as an appropriate reminder of that,” Ms Moss said.
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