Friday, June 13, 2025

Sue me, sue you blues

What a litigious city Birmingham must be. In the last two years, the bankrupt council paid more than £27 million to our learned friends.

Bevan Brittan, which received £8.6 million, is the largest single lawyerly recipient of Birmingham taxpayers’ money.

They say on their website, ‘We have advised Birmingham City Council for many years on a series of major projects and transactions, all of which we have secured through tender.’

The city’s cash is widely spread, however, and sometimes we are not allowed to know who gets it. On April 7, the city solicitor paid out £211,320 in legal fees. This is reported under the heading ‘redacted personal data’. I wonder who got all that dosh?

In the first five months of the year, £431,427 of redacted legal fee payments were made to anonymous beneficiaries.

(Talking of redacted, I note Birmingham Law Society redacted its International Lawyer of the Year Award 2014 from its honours board. It went to Phil Shiner, struck off three years later for making false claims against British soldiers in Iraq.)

The barristers at St Philips Chambers don’t do badly. They earned £743,527 in the last two years.

These chambers (I always think they deserve an apostrophe but apparently not) were the professional home of the Recorder of Birmingham, Judge Melbourne Inman, the man who sentenced Twitter criminal Lucy Connolly to 31 months imprisonment.

Watch his judgment here....

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