The High Court has allowed solicitor Matthew Wales to expand parts of his judicial review challenge to a disciplinary inquiry, including by adding a claim that information about his whereabouts was improperly shared so documents could be served on him.
The ruling does not decide whether the Solicitors’ Disciplinary Tribunal inquiry is lawful or whether Wales committed professional misconduct. It concerns only which grounds he may pursue when the substantive judicial review is eventually heard.
The underlying complaint dates from around March 2016. A Northern Ireland solicitors’ firm alleged that Wales failed to provide documentation needed to retrieve an original European Enforcement Order from the High Court Central Office. The Law Society referred the complaint to the Solicitors’ Disciplinary Tribunal, which found a prima facie case and opened an inquiry in June 2019.
Wales subsequently brought judicial review proceedings seeking to prohibit the inquiry. Those proceedings were delayed for several years. In May 2024, another High Court judge found that his delay since 2020 had been inordinate and inexcusable, although the case was not struck out.
In the present application, Wales sought extensive amendments to his 2019 statement of grounds.
Mr Justice Barr permitted him to plead that the Law Society breached his privacy, reputation and GDPR rights by passing information to the tribunal registrar about another complaint and about his planned attendance at Law Society offices, which enabled personal service of disciplinary papers. The judge stressed that he was merely allowing that legal issue to be argued, not deciding that a GDPR breach occurred.
Several other amendments that clarified or expanded existing complaints were also allowed. A new delay ground against the Law Society was permitted.
However, the court refused proposed claims based on the alleged treatment of Wales’s wife at the 2019 hearing, holding that any such cause of action would be hers. Other proposed allegations were rejected because they were vague, repetitive or concerned facts known more than five years earlier without adequate explanation for the delay.