Email: Defendant tried to cause solicitor trouble
Two solicitors and their brother have been granted an interim injunction by the High Court after a neighbour made “defamatory allegations” to one of their employers as part of a battle over the future of a field between two properties in Sussex.
Aidan Eardley KC, sitting as a deputy High Court judge, said he considered it “very unlikely” that the court would determine at trial that it was reasonable for the defendants to contact DAS Law, where Victoria Russell worked as a solicitor, in the way that they did.
He granted an interim injunction in harassment prohibiting Julia Mazur and Jerome Stuart from contacting Ms Russell, Robert Sully, also a solicitor, Andrew Sully and certain third parties, other than through their solicitors.
Judge Eardley said it appeared that the defendants, litigants in person, would “do whatever it takes” to force the claimants to deal with the field in a way that suited them.
The court was likely to find that their conduct had been “oppressive, unacceptable, and of an order which would sustain criminal liability” under section 2 of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997.
The court was also likely to find that “this was calculated to cause the claimants alarm and distress and has in fact done so”, reject a defence of reasonable conduct and put in place “permanent injunctive relief”.
The dispute concerns a field owned by the claimants between the house in Sussex they used to own and the defendants’ property, vehicular access to which is from the latter. But the owners of the field have a right of way.
The claimants want to sell the field and the defendants are concerned that the eventual buyer would want to build housing on it.
The judge said the defendants “chosen method” of protecting the field had been to “raise multiple disputes about the right of access and related matters”.
This had already led to litigation in the county court, which was settled in June 2023.
One element of the claimants’ complaint concerned communications aimed directly at DAS Law, which Ms Mazur contacted six times in late November 2023 – a telephone call and five emails.
The judge said her first email to William Ellerton, a partner in DAS Law “with oversight of” Ms Russell, was headed ‘Threat of property damage by Victoria Russell against clients of DAS Insurance’, followed by “seven paragraphs of defamatory allegations about the claimants”.
Ms Mazur argued that she contacted DAS Law as a client of DAS Insurance to find out if it would be conflicted from acting for her given Ms Russell’s employment, but the judge said the correspondence suggested this was “just a contrivance”.
Having “spotted the connection” between DAS Insurance, DAS Law, and Ms Russell, the defendants “decided to exploit this in order to cause trouble” and increase the pressure on her and her brothers.
Judge Eardley said that only in the “penultimate paragraph” of Ms Mazur’s first email was the question of a conflict of interest raised.
Mr Ellerton responded by stating that he regarded the dispute “as a private matter but reassured the first defendant that DAS Insurance had a wide panel of solicitors and that there was no requirement that DAS Insurance should use DAS Law”.
Although a court was likely to think that this ought to have allayed the defendants’ “purported concerns”, Ms Mazur “persisted in corresponding with Mr Ellerton, even after he told her in terms that he regarded the correspondence to be at an end”.
Other conduct that contributed to the decision to grant the interim injunction was not complying with requests only to correspond with the claimants’ solicitors, the content and frequency of the correspondence, threatening to report Ms Russell and Mr Sully to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and complaining about their lawyer at Kent firm Girlings, Lee Quickenden, to the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives, which was rejected.
The injunction allows for the defendants to use their contractual right to call the DAS Law 24-hour helpline.
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