Subscribe‘Whether you want to sue someone, retrieve money that is due to you, or defend yourself against a claim, you need a skilled solicitor who can help you through the maze of dispute resolution.’
– George Davies Solicitors
Probably. But given the experience of the poor soul whose recent defamation claim against me was guided by Mark Lewis, I won’t be running any reader offers to promote George Davies Solicitors. Chambers may have found him ‘intellectually powerful’, but when I crossed swords with Mark Lewis, he was in full willie-waving* mode. And as with all willie-wavers, the weaker his client’s position the more furiously Mark Lewis waved his willie and the sillier he looked while doing so.
Coming soon: George Davies Solicitors’ Mark Lewis: willie-waving master class#2
Should bloggers beware libel-chasing lawyers in search of victims? … … ‘I’ve just had … on the phone to me who I can only describe as distraught,’ John Leech MP (Manchester, Withington)
I’m sure that many bloggers would be intimidated by a series of letters from a solicitor who boasts of being a member of the Law Society’s Defamation Reference Group, collector of veteran and vintage cars and keeper of Koi. (As a Henry Enfield character liked to say: ‘I’ve got considerably more money than yo.’)
Most pay nothing to blog and so the prospect of a defamation action that may relieve them of their life savings, and possibly much more, will easily intimidate many into grovelling apologies. Who could blame someone who hit the ‘delete blog’ button rather than face the stress of a libel trial and the financial ruin failure might bring? Expect to pay around £500 (plus VAT) just to respond to a first letter of claim.
So when Mark Lewis waived his willie at Pipex, the UK’s second largest web host, it was first round to the complainant.
In threatening Pipex, Mark Lewis broke no rules and did nothing his peers would regard as sharp practice. But it was a particularly low tactic, akin to suing WHSmith for stocking Private Eye; something Mark Lewis says he’d be happy to do. And you can see why. Newsagents and web hosts are soft targets, more likely to run than mount a defence. No host is going to employ a solicitor to check the validity of a claim – they only charge a couple of quid a month – so Pipex folded. And that must have given the claimant a good feeling (it looked like a third party had taken their side). However, it meant nothing. If a blogger accused me of being bald and I paid a solicitor to say that’s defamatory the blog would get pulled, even though I lost my hair in my early 20s.
I simply moved my blogs to a country where English solicitors aren’t taken so seriously.
Bloggers must take responsibility for what they write and accept that they’re subject to the same laws as everybody else. But my host was threatened, despite my having agreed a timetable for response with the claimant, because it’s an easy way to gag a website, especially when you have no case. To threaten a host is a tactic that should only be employed where the blogger refuses to engage (hiding behind anonymity, for example) or where the libel is criminal (i.e. risks a breech of the peace).
The alternative and current situation effectively hands every solicitor the power to gag UK hosted websites at will.
*For those unfamiliar with the vernacular, ‘willie-waving’ (or ‘willy-waving’) is slang for aggressive (usually male) behaviour often based upon bluff. The willie-waver (in this case Mark Lewis) is likely to be rather pompous and may expect others to be awed by his presence and simply fall into line. It is in this context that I refer to Mark Lewis as a ‘willie-waver’. While this article clearly extends the willie metaphor (the phrase may have its origins in a school boy game that involves urinating up a wall; the winner being the boy who urinates the highest) it is not my intention to state or imply that Mark Lewis has a small (or large, or average) penis. I have no information on which to base such a claim.
