Vaccine: Solicitor was not transparent about his motives
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 has been fined £15,000.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) said Philip Julian Paul Hyland’s letters had been “a tactical device to draw the recipients into litigation” so that he and his clients could “present their cause in the public setting of the court room”.
It continued: “The respondent had not been open and transparent about his motives and the correspondence had set out confused and legally baseless arguments in an unduly aggressive and intimidating way.
“This went beyond a mere mistaken approach as to wording and style and represented a level of disingenuousness and belligerence which was so disproportionate that it constituted professional misconduct.”
The first letter was on behalf of a client who wanted his GP to provide him with an exemption from the vaccine mandate so he could travel to Brazil without self-isolating.
It suggested that, by following government guidance, the surgery was guilty, amongst other things, of unethical and criminal conduct.
The second was sent to the chair of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). It improperly threatened injunction proceedings on behalf of three clients.
One was a GP who said he was unable to give his patients “effective” advice because the MHRA had not authorised alternative forms of treatment; the other two were medical students who had been unable to take work placements required in their studies because they refused vaccination
The letter accused the MHRA of unethical conduct, malfeasance, misfeasance and corporate manslaughter and made demands for undertakings to avert legal proceedings being commenced.
These included removing authorisation from vaccines and stopping further clinical testing, and the chair announcing this in a special Christmas evening television broadcast.
Mr Hyland, who qualified in 1998, is an employment lawyer who set up Lincolnshire firm PJH Law Solicitors in 2002. He had a hitherto unblemished regulatory record.
While admitting that, in hindsight, he could have phrased himself differently, he argued that he was carrying out his clients’ instructions and putting forward a legitimate case whilst abiding by the Civil Procedure Rules and the practice direction on pre-action conduct.
The SDT, while stressing in its newly published ruling that its role was not to judge the wider issues at play, did not agree.
It accepted that Mr Hyland was “a passionate, committed and determined solicitor who had been deeply attuned to the cause and issues upon which his clients had sought his help”, but its impression was that “the depth of his involvement in the cause blinded him somewhat to deficiencies in his approach”.
The 10-page letter to the GP surgery “took an immediately aggressive stance” and contained “a battery of alleged wrong-doing on the part of the medical practice, set out in an objectively generic, legalistic and overbearing way”.
The law as set out in the letter was “confused, distorted and wrongly applied” – it had been “improper from the outset” and had not complied with the CPR and practice direction.
“[Mr Hyland] had treated the medical practice as an unwitting pawn in a wider game and [he] knew or believed that Client A was not entitled to the exemption, yet he pressed ahead with his goal of pushing the medical practice into court or otherwise causing it to ‘cave in’ and thereby establish a precedent by granting an exemption certificate based upon a spurious premise.”
The 16-page letter to the MHRA did not provide any “rational nexus/locus standi” between the claims made and the MHRA, while “the representation of the legal principles supposedly in play were dubious, misconceived or plainly wrong”.
The “fantastical” demands it made for undertakings again showed that the letter had “the ulterior purpose of promoting a campaign against the government’s public health measures and it had therefore been a tactical device, contrary to the true purpose of a letter before action”.
Mr Hyland had lacked integrity and damaged public trust. The SDT decided to fine him £15,000 and order him to pay costs of £66,500.
As a final observation, the tribunal reminded all solicitors and those working for them that “it is an essential part of a solicitor’s role in a free and democratic society to represent, when called upon, the interests of the minority against the majority and to fight cases which may seem unpalatable to the wider public”.
It continued: “Whilst this may include drafting letters and correspondence that are robust and forthright, perhaps even advancing a weak case this must be done with care, precision and courtesy.
“A solicitor must maintain objectivity and a sense of proportion in furtherance of their clients’ instructions.
“The more the solicitor becomes excessively preoccupied with the underlying cause espoused by their clients the greater the danger of moving beyond the limits of their role as a legal advisor.”
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