By Gilo
Berrymans Lace Mawer (BLM) is a major law firm with tentacles in all corners of the defence of institutions in abuse cases. They are currently positioning themselves through a series of webinars to bid for widespread legal management of redress schemes. One of their partners is already involved in the Irish Redress Scheme.
I am the sole solicitor to the Irish Redress Board where to date, I have overseen the completion of 16,650 applications and redress of £953million being paid out. https://www.blmlaw.com/people/sharon-moohan
Although the fee structure for such a contract will be commercially sensitive and closely guarded secret, a simple guesstimate might still be done. A conservative £2000 fee for processing each application would give BLM over £33m. A perhaps more realistic £4000 per application would give BLM £66.6m. Does BLM receive a reverse percentage, or perhaps a bonus for maintenance of sufficient numbers below agreed bands of redress? We don’t know. And probably never will. But these contracts will be very substantial. And BLM is already familiar to many institutions who have relied upon them for aggressive defence against claims. They are well placed to mop up this business in coming years.
Just to be blunt about what’s happening here – this would be the Church’s lawyers, who have cost many survivors our repair and caused much re-abuse with unethical tactics, now positioning themselves to pick up the very lucrative business of redress management. Nice work if you can get it. But perhaps BLM should not be surprised to know that survivors are urging the Church to go elsewhere for legal advice. Too many survivors have bitter experience of the ruthless opportunism and cruelty of Paula Jefferson’s strategies to watch in silence as BLM benefits from the management of the Church’s redress scheme.
The Church needs to signal a clear shift away from the cosy affiliations with lawyers and insurers who have done massive harm, both to survivors and to the reputation of the Church. A sea change is required. As a senior Church figure at the February Synod said:
…Because surely within our dioceses we have the capacity to go further than a ‘full and final settlement’. Surely we have the capacity to do justly, to act mercifully, and even to be generous. Surely we have the capacity to question our insurers about their practices and indeed our lawyers. It occurred to me that actually we can change insurers if we don’t think their methods are ethical. I change my electricity supplier. I am hoping that when I go back to my diocese some of my colleagues, and I’m sure they will, will be asking me some very difficult questions in diocesan synod.
BLM are playing both ends of a circus in a compelling story of hypocrisy. The company has more brass than a colliery band to place itself at the forefront of discussion on redress considering the practices it hoped no-one would notice. Genetic predisposition arguments, use of desk-topping, consent arguments, ugly references to a survivor as ‘hassle value and some risk around publicity’ are just some of the things survivors have managed to bring into daylight so far. Their webinar series represents a bid to claw back credibility in the face of the extensive reputational damage that BLM has brought to a major client. This client must presumably wish that BLM had acted with much greater decency and integrity. The deployment of unethical strategies may end up costing the Church on the way to half a £billion!
An email was recently sent out to participants indicating that the webinars have now been postponed to the New Year. The message also seemed to indicate that BLM might be poised to mop up the Scottish Redress Scheme. Or might have already landed this. How many other schemes will they seek to run? Those of us who have alerted the Church to the unethical situation – are keen that survivors elsewhere realise what is going on. This law firm are the same people who harmed many of us through derisory and harshly contested settlements. If you’re in doubt here are a few articles in which BLM have worked closely in tandem with Ecclesiastical Insurance (there is barely an operational rizla paper between them).
BLM have done enough lasting harm and cannot be trusted. They, and the agents they choose to help them (one of whom is currently being investigated by the General Medical Council) have no real concern for the life-long impact of abuse, no understanding of the limp through life that so many survivors have endured. Nor have they sought to gain understanding. Paula Jefferson the head of their abuse department, who has led many settlements, has ignored complaints or batted them away like unwanted flies. We gather that the Archbishop of Canterbury has ‘fumed’ when he has heard about some of the responses from Paula Jefferson and her senior partners to survivors. To be fair though, the Archbishop has known for a long time and pretended that their unethical strategies weren’t his concern or that he could do little about it. But he seems to have woken up on these things recently.
Redress Schemes should be survivor-centric, involving the participation and experience of survivor groups, and not as lip-service PR but in very real ways with survivors on redress panels. Crucially, these schemes should signal a clear move away from the toxic and cynical processes of the past which were rife with dishonesty, callousness, and ‘horse trade’ games. For these reasons, survivors from the Church of England context have already expressed to the Lead Bishops that any involvement of Paula Jefferson or her partners in BLM in the CofE redress scheme would be highly inappropriate and unethical.
The best way for Berrymans Lace Mawer and Ecclesiastical Insurance to pay their substantial moral debt would be to contribute significantly into the Church of England’s redress fund. And issue statements of apology for the re-abusive harm they have caused so many. Survivors are calling for these corporate agents of the Church to be brought to considerably greater moral account by their client, than the Church has been prepared to do so far. The Church is picking up a colossal bill in lieu of BLM’s inability to read the signs over a long period of time. The Church has a moral responsibility to all survivors to ensue that the responses of institutions begin to be patterned in a new way – one that leads to healing and putting right the institutional evils of the past. It should lead the way in addressing BLM’s practices as clearly unacceptable.
We hope survivors from other institutions will read this, recognise the chicanery that has been pitted against them, and take questions up with the institutions they are calling upon for justice. Please share this widely.
Paula Jefferson has been at BLM for five years, where she is head of their London office: https://www.blmlaw.com/people/paula-jefferson. She had been at DAC Beachcroft from 1996, initially in the Bristol office of what was then Wansboroughs Willey Hargrave. WWH was a ‘national’ firm dealing in insurance claims, which in 1999 merged with the ‘mid-town’ firm of Beachcroft Stanley to form Beachcroft Wansboroughs. In 2011 BW merged with another mid-town firm, Davies Arnold Cooper, to form DAC Beachcroft.
It might therefore be argued that DAC Beachcroft and possibly its precursors have also been part of the process described by Gilo: https://www.blmlaw.com/news/abuse-claims-expert-paula-jefferson-joins-blm.
I see Martyn Percy has yet another complaint against him.
I dont know much about compensation in the church but from what I have seen the amounts awarded are far higher than from CICA which is the only route open to familial abuse survivors if their abuser does not have the means to pay following a civil claim. For serious internal injury, with psychiatrically proven long term mental health problems the maximum is £40,000 and that is the most for any abuse that can be claimed. Rape goes for about £11,000. There is a set table of abuses with awarded amounts, like a menu of sexual perversion, is this any better I wonder? The process is functional rather than caring and the amounts awarded do not rebuild lives, they are simply a recognition that harm was done.
Specialist “abuse” lawyers could institute a class action lawsuit against, for example, the C of E. They would act for a large group of plaintiffs (the survivors of clergy abuse) à la Erin Brockovitch.
Are there any such lawyers reading this who could advise on its feasibility? Forgive me if this question has already been raised.
Because it strikes me repeatedly that individual plaintiffs (if it ever gets that far) stand at a gross disadvantage against the institutional intimidatory might of the Church and its lawyers.