Paul Mitchell QC

“My chosen counsel because of the depth of his experience – he’s a polymath, has excellent investigation skills and has an interest in legal history, which helped in this case.” “Incredibly easy to deal with, exceptionally bright and knowledgeable and a very effective negotiator.” – Chambers & Partners, 2021

“Utterly charming with the mind of an arch-strategist. Exceptionally good at dealing with a very complicated set of facts and issues and magically making the case look simple and straightforward.” – Legal 500, 2021

“He is very thorough and very much on top of his cases. He’s good at identifying opponents’ weaknesses and key points in the case.” “He’s a great advocate who has extremely good judgement. He has a really great instinct for the good and bad points and for how things will turn out.” – Chambers & Partners, 2020

 “Has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the law.” – Legal 500, 2020

 “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.

Malicious Prosecution of Civil Proceedings/ Abuse of Process

Paul is the leading practitioner in England & Wales for these new claims, having appeared in Willers v Joyce, the long-running litigation that gave extended the tort of malicious prosecution to civil claims; advising the winning party in the equivalent case in the Singaporean Supreme Court, Lee Tat Development Pte Ltd v MCSTP No 381 [2018] SGCA 50; representing the wife in CXZ v ZXC, the first case arising from bitterly contested Child Arrangement Order proceedings; acting for the claimant in Mosley v Associated News Limited, the case arising from The Daily Mail’s submitting a “dossier” about Max Mosley to the Crown Prosecution Service; and acting for the claimant in the ongoing Monks v East Northamptonshire Council, the case arising from the travails of Private Eye’s “Lowick One”.

Complex remedy claims

Paul is often instructed in claims where the analysis of causation and quantification of loss are very difficult. High profile cases in 2020 were Sogexia Sarl v R Raphael & Sons Plc, where an application for a quia timet injunction against a bank entering Members’ Voluntary Liquidation is current under appeal to the Court of Appeal; YJB v M&A Pharmachem, where Paul and Tom Shepherd’s client was found to have caused no loss to the claimant despite being found at an earlier trial on liability to have been in breach of a covenant against competition; and Involegal v BLM, where Paul, leading Christopher Boardman QC, successfully resisted summary judgment on a cause of action assigned by an insolvent company.  Paul is currently instructed by one of the principal defendants in the sprawling and multi-jurisdictional SKAT litigation, a case concerning the alleged liability of agents for representations made by their principals when seeking to claim withholding tax relief on share dividends.

Fine art and equestrian litigation

Paul often acts in cases involving the valuation or movement of these unusual precious assets.  In recent years, he has acted in a claim under ecclesiastical law concerning the sale of an Ittenbach by a church in Cheltenham (In Re Emanuel Church, Leckhampton before a consistory court of the Diocese of Gloucester); for a dealer suing a German auction house for fraudulent misrepresentation; for an Italian collector, beneficial owner of an offshore company that in turn owned various important pieces of modern art, in obtaining an injunction on confidential terms; for a dealer regarding a professional negligence claim against an expert in an Old Master; for a consortium of owners obtaining an injunction restraining transport of a stallion from Heathrow to participate in the Southern Hemisphere Breeding Season; and for the owner of a showjumper which was crippled by a farrier; for the owner of a dressage horse accidentally killed while at a stud farm for embryo harvesting.

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.

Since 2017, Paul has been on the board of Ampbar Limited, a lawtech company which provides a platform linking solicitors, barristers and insurers in certain types of claim.

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).