Revealed: The huge cover up of bad practices by leading law firms

Posted on May 19, 2026 by davidhencke

Most people might expect a fake review of a new product, a restuarant or a hotel included among the many posts on company websites..

A forensic investigation by the charity Blind Justice UK of reviews on leading law firms websites reveals this practice exists on an industrial scale with any critical review of the firm ruthlessly removed from the public domain. The chance of a faulty product, a poor meal or a bad night at a hotel pales into insignificance with the loss of money for the client when the law firm goes bust.

The Blind Justice investigation is comprehensive. It looked at 486 website reviews across 22 leading firms, all registered with the Solicitor’s Regulation Authority, which should provide some protection for clients. Every single one was a five star review – not a single critical review existed.

It examined 14 firms that had a complaint history with the Legal Ombudsman in over five cases. Not one was recorded on the firm’s website.
It examined 70,507 Trustpilot reviews analysed across 14 firms and over 16,000 Review Solicitors cases ( more about them later).

One firm had 2,529 consecutive reviews with zero negative feedback across 1,687 days.

What is more disturbing is that three firms, PM Law, SSB Law and Axiom Ince went bust during this period owing clients over £300m between them – a not insubstantial sum – but you would have no early warning from their websites or from the Solicitors Regulation Authority that this was about to happen. The research records 35 reviews removed from PM Law’s profile while the firm was still trading and 7,500 PM Law reviews were no longer reachable through their original URLs. 54 SSB Law’s review count: frozen for five years through its entire collapse.

This has not happened by accident. I have been told of an organisation called Review Solicitors which is recognised by the the Solicitors Regulation Authority and can do all the work to disguise critical reviews for the law firms. I am told for a premium rate of £7000 a month – not too big for the largest firms which often have communication budgets of £1 million a year – all the criticism disappears.

The Review Solicitors platform integrates with law firm case management systems to send automated review invitations at matter close. Firms choose which clients receive an invitation. The platform’s own marketing states: “Not appropriate to send feedback to a client? Simply click a button.” This is review gating by design.

Negative reviews are held for up to 48 hours while the firm attempts to resolve the complaint. Positive reviews are published immediately.

Firms can immediately suspend any review they flag as defamatory or from a non-client. The review is removed first; investigation happens second. The reviewer has 14 days to confirm their identity or the review is permanently deleted. The party with the clearest commercial interest in removal decides whether removal is warranted.

Between 2018 and 2021, ReviewSolicitors quietly changed its ranking algorithm. In 2018, negative inputs included Legal Ombudsman rulings, Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal rulings, and notifications that a firm had threatened legal action against a reviewer. By 2021, all negative inputs had been removed. The revised algorithm rewards size, volume, rating, recency, and “how the law firm has historically collected reviews.” The direction of change is uniform: away from consumer protection, toward commercial engagement.

Between 26 September 2024 and 13 December 2024, the published review count on PM Law’s primary ReviewSolicitors profile dropped from 794 to 759. That is a net loss of 35 reviews in 79 days. The count can only decrease if reviews are being removed. During that three-month window, more reviews were removed from the platform than were added.
While the count was falling, named reviewers were posting unmistakable warnings on the same platform: missed completion dates, unanswered communication, offices that had effectively stopped functioning. These are exactly the problems that materialised at scale when PM Law collapsed on 2 February 2026, with £39.5 million of client money missing.

While the count was falling, named reviewers were posting unmistakable warnings on the same platform: missed completion dates, unanswered communication, offices that had effectively stopped functioning. These are exactly the problems that materialised at scale when PM Law collapsed on 2 February 2026, with £39.5 million of client money missing.

sarah rapson ceo solicitors regulation authority

Blind Justice have this week also published an open letter to Sarah Rapson, Chief Executive of the Solicitors Regulation Authority, calling for an independent audit of the SRA’s complaint closure system. The charity’s accompanying briefing analyses seven years of the SRA’s own enforcement data and will be published in full on 3 June 2026.

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Pat McFadden’s perverse benefit cuts that is undermining the government’s apprenticeship initiative

Posted on May 18, 2026 by davidhencke

05/07/2024. London, Pat McFadden, poses for a photograph following his appointment to Cabinet by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in 10 Downing Street. Picture by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street

With a million young people currently not in work, training or school the government’s plans for a huge increase in apprenticeship programmes is a key plank to get people back to work. The full scale of the programme is published by the business department here.

Yet it turns out that the Department for Work and Pensions is undermining its own initiative by a series of hidden benefit cuts which have been exposed by the experts who monitor changes in the benefit system.

The Social Security Advisory Committee, a panel of experts appointed to scrutinise benefit changes in the ministry, has just produced a highly critical report, revealing that the families whose 16 year olds take up apprenticeship can lose thousands of pounds a year in benefits the moment they take up a place.

“The report shows that when a young person leaves full‑time education to start an apprenticeship, families can face a sudden loss of social security financial support. Often the young person’s apprentice wage theoretically offsets this – although in practice, their parents will only be compensated if a lot of the pay packet is handed over to them. Sometimes, the loss is so great that the household as a whole is worse off – which means that, even if all the apprenticeship earnings were handed to the parent, the family would be poorer. This is particularly the case when the young person has a disability and the loss of social security income can be greater than the apprenticeship wage.”

What is happening is that the family immediately lose child benefit when the 16 year old takes a job and the 16 year old loses his or her universal credit. which is paid to parents. The most seriously affected are disabled people – who the government want to take up jobs – who lose additional benefits.

While the apprentice will receive £8 an hour he or she is expected by the ministry to hand over the money to the family to compensate them. But in many cases the social security experts found the cash fell short. It varied from £68 a month to £1320 a month if the person was disabled.

Dr Stephen Brien, Chair of the Social Security Advisory Committee, said:

“The social security system is not neutral in the choices young people make at 16. In its current form, it can penalise families when young people take up apprenticeships, even though this is a route that government actively encourages. This creates a real risk that decisions are driven by short‑term affordability rather than what is right for a young person’s long-term future.”

In some cases it can lead to the young person abandoning the apprenticeship altogether as the benefit cuts come as a shock and even advisers don’t seem to know about this change.

There is also a rather extraordinary irony in all this – if the young person chooses to turn down the apprenticeship and stays at school, the family continue to get child benefit and disabled people get help. This is exactly the opposite of what the government wants to happen.

The committee are recommending changes to this -particularly if it affects disabled people. But there are no signs despite the cost of living crisis that the ministry wishes to make any change.

I expect with all the plotting surrounding Labour Party leadership Pat McFadden will take his eye off the ball and yet another good government initiative will bite the dust because of penny pinching and Labour being out of touch with voters real lives.

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Journalist who exposed racism,bullying and misogyny among top judicial appointments faces £14,000 bill for FOI requests

Posted on May 15, 2026 by davidhencke

Barnie Choudhury Pic credit: Barnie Choudhury

The Judicial Appointments Commission, the body that appoints the top judges in England and Wales, is pursuing a journalist for an unprecedented bill to try and silence him after a six year investigation exposed huge shortcomings in the handling of applications for new judges, especially from ethnic minorities.

Barnie Choudhury, a journalist on Eastern Eye, a national Asian paper, has pursued the JAC using Freedom of Information requests and covering tribunal cases brought by applicants only to face a £14,200 costs bill from the JAC for daring to challenge the body in a tribunal hearing. The action by the body has been widely condemned by the National Union of Journalists and by newspaper organisations as an attempt to silence him which could have widespread implications for other journalists using FOI requests and covering tribunal cases to root out malpractice.

judge abbas mithyani KC Pic credit: Eastern Eye

One of the cases he covered involved Abbas Mithani KC, a former designated civil judge for the West Midlands and Warwickshire. He was asking the General Regulatory Chamber to rule whether the Judicial Appointments Commission [JAC] and Information Commissioner’s Office [ICO] were wrong to deny him full disclosure to three freedom of information requests he made.

He accused the JAC of “avoiding public scrutiny” and one of its heads of being “guilty of gross negligence and deliberate recklessness”.

The JAC used exemptions under the act, and the ICO upheld its decisions, even though there was an error in the decision-making process, the panel heard. “Their reliance on those exemptions are flawed and incorrect,” said Mithani in his opening statement to the online tribunal.

One exemption under the FOI act which allows public bodies to refuse information on the grounds that it would “prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs” depended on a qualified person to approve this. Through Choudhury’s work the judge discovered the JAC had no qualified person to do this.

His public challenge has been echoed by complaints from a number of anonymous judges who did not want to challenge the body as they did not trust them to treat them fairly.

The judges – South Asian and white – talked of bullying, racism and misogyny as being widespread in the judiciary – when applying for new appointments. But complaints are only accepted if they come from people who publicly say who they are. Some are on on anti depressants, others even contemplated suicide.

Worse, bodies that would have powers to investigate what appears to be widespread abuse of the system have no resources to do so. Their budgets have been hollowed out by previous governments and Labour show no signs of giving them extra resources. These include the Information Commissioner’s Office, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and even Parliamentary select committees who have turned down investigations.

There is push back from inside the judiciary. Notably Judge Kaly Paul from the Justice Support Network who won £50,000 in a settlement after she took from her employer to a tribunal over bullying claims. She wrote to the Commons justice select committee:

“We understand that this cancer of secret soundings: sifting for attitudes, allegiances, composed of gossip and never revealed to the candidate has crept in and proliferated within the system, being used at a far earlier stage in the process than before. It creates bias and undermines the apparent objectivity of scoring from other subjective panel assessment and other information sources,”

What appears to be here is the harassment of a journalist who over a long period has reported and revealed a very bad situation in one of the country’s most important legal bodies.

In my view they have misused laws designed to protect the public and the press using both their rights under the Freedom of Information Act and regulations governing tribunals.

Over 20 years ago I sat on the Lord Chancellor’s advisory committee on implementing the 2005 Act. The whole emphasis was to make it easier for people to obtain information and hold public bodies to account. it is simply called open government. The JAC has abused its position to withhold fundamental material – like how much as been spent on staff and legal costs fighting these judges. We don’t know the full package given to the chief executive of the organisation who resigned, we do now know that at least £212,000 was spent in legal costs to stop challenges from judges.

As for the £14,200 costs the journalist is facing – it goes against the whole grain of the tribunal system where the vast majority of claimants are not charged any costs. Indeed to seems to me to be a device used to intimidate whistleblowers who have annoyed public bodies and the NHS ( examples include Alison McDermott exposing bullying at Sellafield, and a leading cardiologist at St Helier hospital who exposed patient safety issues. It seems vindicative and aimed to ruin an individual.

I note the JAC is employing one of the most expensive KC known as the “Treasury Devil” – the colloquial title for the First Treasury Counsel (Common Law), a leading barrister retained to represent the UK Government in major civil litigation, often in the Supreme Court. Currently, this key legal role is held by Sir James Eadie KC. He is the man who fought the judicial review to stop the government paying any cash to 3.6 million 50s women pensioners who felt cheated by the system and also took on the Scottish government.

As for Barney himself there is an excellent description of where he stands in an Eastern Eye article.

” The problem with me is that I’m a campaigning journalist who isn’t scared or overawed by authority. It’s always been this way. My bosses say I’m a maverick. I argue that every organisation needs one. My family worry that I don’t know when to back down with authority figures. That problem is exacerbated by the fact I’m brown. Sadly, some white people just don’t get that we of colour can be as intelligent as they are.”

As for the JAC it doesn’t comment on individual cases but there was a telling response from one of their lawyers during the Mithani case.

JAC’s barrister Natasha Simonsen told the hearing “Some very serious allegations have been made, and they are rejected in their entirety,” Simonsen said.

“The allegations are not only against the JAC but also against that JAC’s legal advisers, the GLD and perhaps me as well.

“These are matters we take extremely seriously.

“If the tribunal considered any of that relevant then we would wish to respond in writing to those specific allegations.

“Mr Thomson and his colleagues in the JAC, and my colleagues at the GLD are extremely hard working civil servants who have strived consistently to do the right thing at every stage of the proceedings.

“There is absolutely no desire to cover things up or suppress information.

“What there is is a concern to protect personal information, including sensitive or special category information for both applicants of judicial office and panel members.

“There is also a concern to ensure the appointments system is not prejudiced by disclosure of scoring frameworks which may be unable to be reused in subsequent exercises.”