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Legal
Davenport Lyons lawyers guilty of professional misconduct for ACS-style letter sending
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 13 June 2011
When they finally get round to making the movie about ACS:Law man Andrew Crossley’s ill-fated attempt to make a quick buck while pretending to care about intellectual property rights, the early scenes will presumably show how the former lawyer didn’t even come up with the idea of sending out letters to suspected file-sharers in a bid to intimidate them into paying a damages settlement over allegations which would unlikely stand up in court.
That honour belongs to music business law firm Davenport Lyons, or, rather, two of its employees, David Gore and Brian Miller (the latter has since left the company). They were the first to start sending out speculative letters to suspected file-sharers on behalf of generally smaller content owners, making serious sounding allegations and demanding £500 to make said allegations go away.
Consumer rights magazine Which? became aware of the Davenport Lyons letters and shopped them to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority, claiming the letters made baseless claims, that they were ‘bullying’ in nature, and that the processes employed by the legal men to assess the guilt of the alleged file-sharers were not sufficient to ensure a significant number of innocent people weren’t targeted.
An SRA investigation followed, which found there was credence in Which? magazine’s claims, and the matter was passed to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal last year.
The hearing on the matter took place last week and, according to ComputerActive, Timothy Dutton, speaking for the SRA, told the tribunal that Gore and Miller’s scheme was designed primarily to make money by “browbeating people into submission”, some of whom were likely to be innocent of the copyright infringement charges. Dutton added that the Davenport Lyons lawyers used only the “flimsiest” evidence when deciding whom to send letters to, adding that their scheme had been “a wholly inappropriate discharge of professional duties”.
According to TorrentFreak, the Tribunal subsequently found Gore and Miller guilty of professional misconduct on six counts. Penalties, which could include fines or even disbarring, will be decided on next month.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned Crossley, who took over where Gore and Miller left off after Davenport Lyons decided to shut down their dodgy letter sending division, will face the same Tribunal later this year. The one time bullish legal man, whose company crashed and burned once he took some of his copyright claims to court and his ignorance of basic intellectual property law was revealed, was declared bankrupt last week.
It is worth noting that, while a number of them make use of Davenport Lyons’ legal services, most UK record companies, and record label trade body the BPI, have been critical of the letter sending schemes led by Gore, Miller and Crossley since the start, and few music companies made use of the dodgy letter sender’s ‘expertise’.
