Paul Mitchell QC

“Very personable, gets to the nub of the issue quickly and doesn’t faff around the edges. He’s incredibly calm and cool as an advocate.” “Very bright and becomes part of the team.” – Chambers & Partners, 2019

Paul’s professional liability work involves allegations made against solicitors, barristers, accountants (especially tax advisers), fund managers and financial advisers (giving bespoke advice and recommending tax mitigation schemes). He is particularly experienced in questions of scope of duty, causation, the recoverability of losses claimed, and mitigation. In addition to his trial experience, Paul is frequently actively involved in assisting at mediations leading to settlement. He is instructed by both claimants and defendants, and is often asked by both sides to provide a written opinion on the merits to assist with settlement negotiations. He is on the PNBA’s approved list of adjudicators authorised to adjudicate professional liability disputes pursuant to the current Pre-Action Protocol on Professional Negligence claims.

Paul is currently on the executive committee of the Professional Negligence Bar Association.

Cases

Paul acts in a wide variety of commercial disputes, both in England and offshore. He has particular experience of freezing injunctions, shareholder disputes, company valuation disputes, professional negligence claims (in particular against lawyers and tax advisers) and fraud (alleged Ponzi schemes, SDLT avoidance schemes, money laundering and sanctions avoidance schemes). He speaks Russian, Italian, French and Farsi has a particular interest in cases with connections to countries where those languages are spoken.

Paul has a growing practice involving claims about claims: where a party alleges that his or her opponent in earlier litigation brought that litigation maliciously and without reasonable and probable cause; and/ or that the earlier litigation was an abuse of process on the basis that it was brought for a collateral purpose to obtaining the relief claimed in the pleadings. Paul is particularly well-placed to advise on such claims following Willers v Joyce [2016] UKSC 43, a case in which he remains instructed. He has also provided advice and assistance in relation to malicious prosecution claims overseas.

Paul has assisted in the resolution of several family disputes over money where, regardless of the pleaded causes of action, the dispute has been far more concerned with powerful emotions such as betrayal, pride and the desire for vengeance.

Paul is experienced in claims arising from the sale at auction of works of art, mainly involving allegations of misrepresentation but he also has experience of the ecclesiastical law of faculties, having represented an art dealer before the Chancellor of the Diocese of Gloucester in the Consistory Court in connection with a painting acquired at auction in the absence of a faculty.

He advises regularly in connection with litigation on the Isle of Man, including at present a claim made by one of the world’s largest property companies and involving litigation being conducted across several jurisdictions as well as various pieces of litigation arising from a family dispute. He is instructed to advise in a major and high-profile piece of litigation on foot in Singapore; and has recently represented the Works Council of Marks & Spencer France in an action against that company arising from its decision to make its entire workforce redundant. He has recently been advising in connection with a significant potential investor-state arbitration.

Cases

Paul is frequently instructed as an advocate in arbitration proceedings, and is an accredited mediator trained at the Regent’s School of Psychotherapy and Counselling under the late Dr Freddie Strasser.  He is often invited by clients to attend mediations as he is an active and constructive contributor to obtaining satisfactory resolution of the dispute at hand.  He has chaired numerous committees over the course of his career, including almost every year one of Lincoln’s Inn’s major scholarship award panels, and has a low-friction, respectful but firm style of leading panels to well-reasoned, soundly-evidenced decisions supported by all members of the committee or panel.

Paul’s experience of professional negligence claims is a critical component of his practice in regulatory and disciplinary work, whether acting for the complainant before the Taxation Disciplinary Board (the disciplinary body for the Chartered Institute of Taxation and the Association of Taxation Technicians) or defending before the ICAEW Disciplinary Tribunal or the Solicitors’ Disciplinary Tribunal. He is often asked to advise solicitors and accountants regarding complaints and disciplinary investigations, and has been instructed on several occasions by the Taxation Disciplinary Board to make amendments to the regulations governing its disciplinary procedure.

Paul was junior counsel in the £100 million Convergence v Chantrey Vellacott claim ([2007] EWHC 1774 (Ch); [2008] EWHC 360 (Ch); various other decisions without neutral citation numbers) in which a telecoms company alleged that its business in Greece had been destroyed by the negligence of its advisers; the case mainly revolved around detailed expert analysis of the relevant technology and its associated licensing regime.  Since then his work in this field has mainly concerned cases involving cyber-fraud, in particular where solicitors’ client accounts have been targeted by fraudsters via hacked email accounts and/ or fake emails purporting to come from clients or counterparties.

In 2017 Paul was invited on to the board of a lawtech company currently sandbox-testing a product designed for use by solicitors, barristers and insurers.  The company is working in close collaboration on this with a major firm of solicitors, and beta-testing ​​​is beginning at the beginning of Q3 2018.  As a result, Paul has a growing involvement with lawtech, has lectured on lawyers’ liabilities arising from the use of AI.

Paul’s extensive experience in claims arising from earlier litigation, particularly claims against lawyers, has given him particular insight into the handling of disputes connected with legal costs. In recent years, besides being involved in many cases where a principal head of damages has been in respect of costs incurred in earlier proceedings (see in particular Herrmann v Withers [2014] PNLR 15, the leading case on how costs awarded as damages should be assessed, indemnity or standard basis; and Willers v Joyce [2018] AC 843, the leading case on the recovery of “extra” costs, i.e., the difference between what a client received on detailed assessment and the actual sum paid to his or her lawyers), Paul has also been instructed:

• To advise in a claim arising from a firm of solicitors’ failures to understand the effect of the costs regime in a case subject to a Group Litigation Order;
• To assist applicants for litigation funding in preparing their term sheets for potential funders
• To obtain costs against non-parties (see in particular Convergence v Chantrey Vellacott [2007] EWHC 1774 (Ch) and Willers v Joyce, forthcoming).