Chapter 20 Judgment

The order was made on the twenty-fourth of August 2026 at about eleven in the morning in chambers, and it is two pages, and paragraph 3 is the whole of the case and paragraph 4 is the whole of me. Here is paragraph 3, in full, and I am going to reproduce it because I have been a lawyer for three years and this is the first document I have ever read that I would want framed, and I am not going to pretend that I would want it framed, and I am reproducing it because it is the truth and because it took nine people nine years to arrive at and because it is four sentences long. "It is common ground between the parties that the codicil dated the third of March 2026 is not the testamentary instrument of the deceased. In the circumstances, and in particular in the absence of any evidence as to the circumstances in which the document came into existence, the tribunal makes no finding as to the authenticity of the codicil, and the applicant's proposal that clause 11 thereof should be construed as disapplying Article 12 of the settlement of 22 April 2011 is dismissed. The applicant's application dated 6 April 2026 is dismissed. No order as to costs." I have read paragraph 3 about two hundred times since the twenty-fourth of August and I have got it down to two things. The first is "it is common ground." Mr Lowe said it was common ground on the eleventh of August and it was not, and I corrected it, and then the parties spent thirteen days negotiating a set of words that the tribunal would accept, and both sets of words were agreed between the parties and not found by the tribunal, and that is what "common ground" means in a tribunal in this jurisdiction, and every practitioner in the country knows it, and almost nobody outside the country does. So the codicil is void because two solicitors agreed that it was, and not because a judge found that it was a forgery, and the judge has said expressly in the same paragraph that she makes no finding as to its authenticity, and has done so for a reason which is on the face of the order and which I have thought about every day since. "In the absence of any evidence as to the circumstances in which the document came into existence." I had no evidence. I have spent six months saying that I had no evidence, and I was right, and on the eleventh of August a judge wrote it down, and that is the difference between a lawyer's private terror and a finding, and it is the only conversion I am ever going to get out of six months of my life. The second thing about paragraph 3 is the fourth sentence. "No order as to costs." That is unusual. In a construction application where an applicant withdraws or is unsuccessful, the usual outcome is that the applicant pays the respondent's costs, or that there is no order. Here there is no order at all, and Mr Lowe asked for it, and the tribunal refused it, and the reason given was, in open court, that neither party's conduct had been unreasonable. I want to say what that means, because it is the only part of this case that anybody in the family will care about, and I want to be accurate about it. It means that Garrick Lowe, in eleven days of negotiation, in about nine emails and two telephone calls, in the most professional manner I have ever encountered from anybody of any age in any profession, had a written offer delivered by hand to a junior solicitor of two years and eleven days' qualification on the seventh of August 2026 with a twenty-four hour deadline, requiring her to state on paper the substance of every conversation she had had for five months about a dead man, and requiring it to be signed by her personally, in circumstances where the man making the offer had known her name and her office since the fourth of March 2026 and had no reason at all to suppose that she did not know it. And it means that she did not do it. And that she told a silk, and that the silk made her write down what she had done, and that it took four days and it is in a book that anybody can buy. And it means that a judge of sixty-four looked at that on the twenty-fourth of August and declined to order costs against her. That is the whole of what happened to me, and it cost about four hundred and eleven thousand pounds of costs, a career, and a clerk, and I have thought about whether that is a good trade on approximately nine hundred occasions since the twenty-fourth of August, and I have got a different answer every time, and the answer I have most recently is that it is not my trade to make. Here is the last part, and I am going to write it in a flat way because I have written all of this in a flat way and I am tired. The hearing of the ninth of September 2026 with Aveline Roux happened. I took the codicil and the torn page and the advice note of the twenty-ninth of July, and nothing else, as instructed. She read all three in about twenty minutes and did not say a word about any of them, and then she said: "Right. Now. What is Dugray Precision Limited?" And I said, "A company that makes precision components for valve gear, with about eighty employees, and a freehold at Hallam Row which is most of its asset value, and a majority shareholding held by the estate of a man who died in February." And she said, "No. What is it to you?" And I said, "It is an application, and the application is dismissed." And she said, "Yes," and closed the file, and then she said, "Then go and write that down, and get it out of your system, and then go and do a construction application that has nothing to do with this one, and I will write to you about that one in October, and you will take it, and you will be supervised by somebody who is not me and who I will telephone, and you will not be the only person in the room, and you will not be the beneficiary, and you will not be frightened." I said, "Thank you, my Lady." And she said, "You did the right thing in November 2016 and the right thing in August 2026 and there is no reason on this earth for you to think otherwise, and I have watched a great many people get this wrong and I have watched almost nobody get it right, and you got it right twice, and the second time cost you everything, and I want you to write that sentence at the end of whatever you write about this, because it is true, and because in about ten years somebody who is not going to believe a word of this is going to read it." So here is the end of it, and it is the fourteenth of September 2026, and I am a solicitor of two years and eleven days and one week's qualification, employed at a firm of forty-eight, and I have no application and no client and no file and a hundred and ten thousand pounds of costs outstanding, and I am going back to the ninth floor on Monday morning to start a construction application that has nothing to do with this one, with a supervising partner I have not met, and I have been up since five because I could not sleep, and I have been sitting in a flat in this city writing this at a two-desk office in my head. I am not going to be able to answer the question. I have had a man from a newspapers' editor, two journalists, a silk and a judge ask me six times, and I have given four different answers, and the fifth time, in a corridor on the eleventh of August, I gave an answer that was in the third person and was about four minutes long and cost me the case, and that answer was the right one, and I did not plan it, and I have decided to stop trying to find out where it came from. I am going to say this instead, and then I am going to go to bed. An eighty-one-year-old man founded a company in 1968 out of four hundred pounds and a loan from his wife. In 2011 he sat in a room for three days with two firms of solicitors and could not agree one clause, and a young clerk folded a page down at the bottom of a schedule and nobody opened it. In 2017 his own solicitor told him, in writing, in the correct professional way, that the thing he was relying on would not work, and then told him he was not proceeding on the footing that the work did not happen, which is a sentence that has no legal function whatsoever and which a partner wrote at eleven o'clock at night because it was true. In 2019 an application was brought against him and lost on a delay, and in a board minute he said that the application was not late and not early but timed. In 2025, in a kitchen in Ardmore Road, four days after being told that he was going to die, he told his daughter that it was a long road and that I was on it, and he refused to say whose sentence it was, and he said, of the man who came in the end, "Not mine." And then in February 2026 he died, and in March 2026 nine pages were typed, and a woman of fifty-one signed a receipt in a room with a kind man who had done something in 1991 and had been carrying it for thirty-five years, and she read them in a car on the way home and telephoned a firm before she telephoned her mother. And I read them in ninety seconds on the fourth of March 2026 in a room on the fourteenth floor with the blinds half down, and I put them face down, and I went to the window, and I stood there for about ninety seconds, and I came back and did not pick them up. I did not know then and I do not know now what was in his mind, and I have written down everything I can remember him as having said, and the list is four sentences long, and one of them is a joke, and one of them is an instruction, and one of them is two words. The fourteenth of August 2026 was a Friday. The application was listed in chambers and I did not file anything and I withdrew it in the middle of the hearing and the tribunal made no finding and awarded no costs, and a man who has never lost one of these told me in a corridor that he thought we were going to lose it. That is the case. That is all of it. I have been asked twice whether I would do it again and I have given four different answers, and this one is the fifth, and it is the last one, and I am going to bed.