第17章 The Lawyer's Lien

I am not going to be able to pay for the hearing on the eleventh of August and I am going to be a hundred and forty thousand pounds out of pocket by the end of the month, and I want to write the whole of that down because it is the part of this case that has actually happened to my life and it is not the part anybody prints. Here is the position, and I am going to do it as a statement of account, because I have been doing everything as a statement of account since the fourth of March and I have got into the habit and I am not going to change now. Brannock Vey is a firm of forty-eight solicitors. It is not a magic firm. It has a charity, and a community interest company, and a sports partnership with a local club, and a website, and a training contract, and about nine partners, and it does private client, and commercial, and property, and employment, and it does not do construction applications except when a client asks. I am employed. I am an employee. I have a salary and I have pension and I have worked here for three years and nine months and I have a contractual entitlement to about four hundred billable hours a year and I have billed about eleven hundred and forty in six months, which is more than I have ever billed, and which is the only thing I have got to be proud of that is not about a boy in a corridor. The hearing on the eleventh of August 2026 is in chambers, which means a judge alone, which means no public seats, which means about six people in a room of which four are from Hale and Marchetti, and I have estimated my costs, and the estimate is a hundred and ten thousand pounds including counsel, and my firm is going to pay for it, because the firm is acting, and I am not going to be allowed to say otherwise. And then in the last week of July the thing happened that has happened to every junior in this profession for about two hundred years, which is that the client asked for the bill to be given to somebody else. I want to set out the conversation because it is the most important conversation of my working life and it lasted about nine minutes and it was in a corridor. Emory Fenn is sixty-eight. He is the managing director of Dugray Precision Limited. He is not the Dugray family; he came in as an investment manager in 2011 when the family sold thirty-nine per cent to a vehicle he had run, and he has been the chief executive since, and he has been the applicant in this application since the sixth of April 2026, and he has been extremely decent to me in a way that I have found harder to bear than anything Garrick Lowe has done. On the twenty-ninth of July 2026, in a corridor, he said: "Ms Prentice. I want to raise the funding of this." And I said, "Of course." And he said, "I've had advice and I am told that the sensible thing is for the company's costs in this application to be met by somebody with a bigger balance sheet than a company of eighty people who have just been through a bad seven years." And I said, "Who has advised you on that." And he said, "Mr Lowe." And I said, "Mr Lowe is on the other side." And he said, "Mr Lowe has been extremely helpful to me on a personal matter, and I am not going to discuss it, and I am asking you whether your firm will accept funding from Mr Lowe's firm for this application." I want to set out exactly what I did, and it is this. I said, "No." And I said, "And Mr Fenn, I am going to explain to you in about ninety seconds why that is a serious thing to have said to me, and then I am going to go back to my office, and I am not going to take any further instruction from you today." And then I said, in a corridor, on the twenty-ninth of July 2026, standing up, to a man of sixty-eight, the following, and I have written it out from memory and I have got it right because I have been saying it to myself for eleven days. "Mr Lowe is counsel of record for the party opposing you. He has not been a party to any funding arrangement, because he is a partner in the firm that represents the party opposing you, and if his firm funds your application then there is a conflict of interest that runs the whole way through your case and I have to stop acting for you whether you consent or not, and you are not going to be able to consent to it in a way that helps either of us, because the point of a conflict of interest is not that the client agrees to it. And I am going to be able to say to your board on Friday that Mr Lowe offered to fund this application and that I declined it, and I am going to say that it was raised with me by you and not by him, and I am going to say that I do not know how he knew, and both of those statements are going to be true, and I want you to think about which of them is going to be easier to defend in about three years." And Emory Fenn said, "I see," and went away, and I went back to the ninth floor and sat in a two-desk office and did not do any work for about an hour and a half. Here is what I have worked out in the eleven days since, and I have worked it out by going back over every document in the file, and I want to be careful because Aveline Roux has told me twice not to build a case out of coincidences. I have not found a connection. I have looked for one and I have not found one, and I would like that recorded in a book which is otherwise full of things I have found. What I have found is this. Garrick Lowe's firm, Hale and Marchetti, has a property division which does, among other things, development funding, and Mr Lowe has been a partner in it for twenty-two years. That is a public fact and it is on their website and it is not a secret. The Company, Dugray Precision Limited, took a development facility in about 2023 from a lender, and the lender's facility was arranged by Hale and Marchetti, and I found that in the discovery of the other side, which Mr Lowe gave me on the fourth of June 2026, in a bundle, as a matter of course, and which I have been looking at again for eleven days. So Hale and Marchetti advise a company on a loan, and Hale and Marchetti are the firm of record opposing that company in a construction application, and the senior partner of the property division of that firm is the partner who has run the opposition from the beginning, and that partner is a man to whom the chief executive of that company is personally indebted in a way that has not been explained to me in ninety seconds in a corridor. That is a conflict of interest in the ordinary sense. That is a conflict of interest that any partner in any firm would spot in a second, and it is a conflict that my own firm has not raised, and that I have not raised, and that Mr Lowe has not raised, and that in about two hundred and forty hours of video of hearings that I have watched since the middle of May, Mr Lowe has not looked uncomfortable once. I am going to write down the thing that frightens me and I am going to write it in one sentence. Either Garrick Lowe knows exactly what he is doing and the funding question in that corridor on the twenty-ninth of July was an accident produced by a frightened chief executive, and I have a conflict of interest problem in my own case that I have to disclose before the eleventh of August. Or Garrick Lowe put the phrase "somebody with a bigger balance sheet" into the mouth of a man of sixty-eight, in a corridor, on purpose, in order to be told no, in front of nobody, so that it would come out later as the disclosure of a senior partner's conduct in a case he is winning, and I have just handed him the only thing he wanted. I cannot tell which. I have been going back and forth for eleven days and I have got to the point where I have to decide what to do about it, and the decision is due on the sixth of August, and it is the only decision in this case that is not about 1998 or 2011 or 2017 or 2026, and it is about me, and Aveline Roux has told me three times that it will be about me, and she has been right three times.