Not ‘friendly warnings’, tribunal finds
A solicitor who sent “threatening” letters to nearly 250 schools regarding the implementation of Covid measures has been fined £2,500.
Lois Yvonne Bayliss was found by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) to have sent letters to at least 244 secondary schools, warning them of potential civil and criminal liability for implementing Covid measures
The measures in question were requiring face masks to be worn, carrying out routine lateral flow tests and facilitating Covid vaccinations for children aged between 12 and 17.
The letters were headed with her law firm’s letterhead and logo, and concluded in the final paragraph that she would “continue to observe your response to this polite letter should we not hear from you to confirm your intentions towards swift compliance”.
Bayliss, who runs a firm in Sheffield, claimed the letters were simply “friendly warnings” to the schools, but the SDT was not convinced.
“It was difficult to see how the letters”, the tribunal said, “could not have been perceived otherwise than representing an implied threat of some type of action”. This was especially the case where the recipients received this “unsolicited correspondence, completely out of the blue and in circumstances where they were no doubt contending with an unprecedented situation”.
Far from being friendly, it found the correspondence was “not merely passive-aggressive but threatening in nature with the final paragraph containing an element of menace and intimidation which belied its entreaty that it was a ‘polite letter’”.
The tribunal acknowledged that Bayliss had a “genuine belief,” based on scientific evidence, that the measures posed a danger to children. However, it deliberately refrained from ruling on whether the contents of the letters were misleading.
It said: “The matters for the tribunal to consider did not extend to wider issues of the merits or de-merits of government policy and/or the rights and wrongs of the vaccination programme and the underlying scientific knowledge known or unknown at the time.”
The core issue for the tribunal was whether Bayliss had lacked integrity in sending the letters. “The power imbalance inherent within the letters not only vis-à-vis solicitor/lay person but also in what [Bayliss] chose not to include in her letters i.e. that she was not writing as a solicitor; that she was not acting under client instructions; that no proceedings (whether criminal or civil) were within her contemplation, and that she would not be following up to see whether the recipient had complied.”
“A solicitor acting with integrity would have been very clear about these matters and not permitted any confusion to arise in the recipient’s mind,” the tribunal said.
“The recipient would have been, at the very least, confused as to [Bayliss’] standing in the matter, it continued. “The recipient would not have known, with the clarity they deserved, whether [Bayliss] was acting as a solicitor upon instructions; whether they were expected to seek their own legal advice or whether this was, as [Bayliss] claimed it to be, merely helpful advice.”
In sending the letters without further explanation of her position, Bayliss had been “exploiting her standing and role as a solicitor in order to lend weight to the implied legal threats”.
Whilst the tribunal found that there was “no evidence of actual harm caused to anyone” beyond the the “confusion and anxiety” experienced by the recipients, the solicitor had caused “not insignificant” harm to the reputation of the profession. The level of seriousness of the misconduct was, therefore, “high”.
It did not uphold allegations that she had encouraged others to send letters or had sent letters to GP surgeries.
For her actions, Bayliss was fined £2,500 and ordered to pay reduced costs of £30,000.