SLAPPs

Understanding Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation Hello, I'm Tom Cross and welcome to Cross Examination. I'm a barrister in London working on cases with cultural, moral and ethical importance. In this podcast, expert panellists join me to take an independent look at the law surrounding one of these issues. Justice, someone once said, is open to all, like the Ritz. But it's not only getting into court where money counts. Some are worried that those with very significant resources can use litigation as a strategy to silence accusers and so protect their reputation. On this analysis, faced with such an opponent and the corresponding financial risk, the accuser is left with no alternative but to back down. For that reason, some people welcome so-called anti slap rules which are now found on the statute book. But whether or not anti slap rules are on balance a good thing, and if so their proper contours remains the subject of vigorous debate, engaging as it does both the principles of freedom of expression and access to justice. On today's episode, I talked to Dan Needle, a tax journalist who recently became the first person successfully to rely on the statutory provisions whose case provides much food for thought. And to chew on that with me, as always, two of the very best in the field, Matthew Gill. Matt Gill is a defamation lawyer at Good Law Project, a not-for-profit that seeks to defend human rights and fight for equality through strategic litigation. Matt frequently represents activists and journalists who face legal claims after speaking out on issues of public interest. Hi Matt. Hello. Ian Wilson is Vice Chair of the Society of Media Lawyers and the Managing partner of Brett Wilson, a central London firm specializing in defamation and privacy law as well as regulatory defense. His firm acts for claimants and defendants both in litigation and pre publication matters. And he represented Hamlin's partner Chris Hutchings during an investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority into slap like conduct high in good afternoon Matt. The Legal Framework: What Constitutes a SLAPP? We better start with what is a slap and and what's the basic idea behind it. Speaker 2 Yes. So SLAP stand for strategic lawsuits against public participation. And what we mean by that are legal claims brought in a disproportionate or aggressive or an intimidating way to try and stop a person from speaking out on a topic of public interest. These typically involve defamation claims, privacy claims, sometimes harassment or malicious. Speaker 1 Falsehood. Speaker 2 And also data protection, they're the common claims that we see. And these kind of slap claims are often brought by rich and powerful people who can't afford or who can't afford to rack up significant legal costs. And by doing so, put pressure on the recipient of the slap to perhaps back down, as you say, because of the they can't afford to respond to the pre action letters or the litigation that they're on the receiving end of. In 2023, the government brought in legislation, the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act. And in that legislation, provisions were made for anti slap rules to be introduced in the court system. And those rules came into place in in June 2025. And what that does is allow defendants to make slap applications to get claims struck. Speaker 1 Out be in this business of identifying what is a slap. If slaps are a slaps are a good thing at all, is that something we can come on to? The difficulty in doing that at the moment, this statutory provision that Matt mentions in this 2023 Act, what, what does it look like? What are its basic ingredients? Speaker 3 So the provisions that are the only provisions currently in force relate to so-called economic crime. And the reason for that is they were shoehorned into the Economic Crime Corporate Transparency Act at the last minute that happens to be going through Parliament. When this issue came to the public prominence, they were rushed in. And that's the reason why they they're not, they're not presently broader than economic crime, although the definition of economic crime is quite broad and and a concern. Allegations of fraud, money laundering, bribery, corruption, taxed avoidance. The statute sets out a list of criteria that must be met in order for the slap definition to to be found. The claim of behaviour must be intended to restrict the defendant's freedom of speech, and that will be met in nearly all defamation claims because that's the purpose of a defamation claim is to prevent unlawful speech. The speech has to be in the public interest. Again, there's an extremely broad definition here. Then the criteria gets slightly more controversial, difficult to define. The conduct by the claimant has to cause the defendant harassment, alarm or distress or distress, or any other expense or inconvenience beyond that ordinarily encountered the course of properly conducted litigation. If the court agrees on an application from a defendant that the slap criteria is met, then it can then strike out the claim. If the the claimant fails to discharge a burden that then falls on them that the claim would more likely than not succeed at trial, it kind of doesn't have to be struck out of that case. It can simply proceed with this slap badge on it. In those circumstances, rather oddly, A claimant can go on and be awarded damages despite the court having branded their claim slap, albeit that there would be cost protection for the. Speaker 1 Defendant and this business of one of the criteria being that the claimant has to intend to cause the defendant 1 of various 3 one of various things harassment, alarm or distress, expense, other harbour inconvenience. You have to intend some sort of harm, but beyond that ordinarily encountered in the course of what it calls the statute, properly conducted litigation. That strikes me as a phrase which is redolent of ambiguity and something that lawyers can argue over till the cows come home and do. Do we get any help from the statute? Speaker 3 The statute does provide some factors. Firstly, whether the litigation is a proportionate response. Secondly, the court can consider whether a claim could have been brought about some brought against this another defendant with greater pockets. So examples that might be used there are where a journalist has been sued, where a publisher could could have been sued. The third factor the court can use to assess whether it's beyond what's normal is compliance with Civil Procedure rules. Speaker 1 We've mentioned that on the current law, the expression must have to do with economic crime. Inside a SLAPP: Dan Neidle's Personal Legal Battle I spoke to Dan Needle, the first person to have obtained a strike out of a claim against him because it was a slap, and started by asking him about his work. Speaker 4 My name is Dan Needle. I was a tax lawyer for many years eventually I became head of UK tax at a large law firm. I wanted to pursue tax law and try and nudge the public debate around tax law in a direction I thought was more productive. So I founded a so the micro think tank or pro bono think tank, I don't know what you call it, called Tax Policy Associates. And the idea is that we have no funding. So we're not beholden to anyone. We have no real expenses, no costs rely entirely upon the expertise of lawyers and tax advisors who I initially it was people I already knew. Since then, quite a few volunteers have stepped forward, now about 50 people, all expert in different things, who provide their expertise pro berlo to try and improve tax policy. Speaker 1 So you've been involved in this, this case to do with Mr. Kamal, We go back to the start of the story. Can can you just summarize then, Dan, what this blog said in the context of your work that you've described? Speaker 4 So Mr. Kamal came on my radar in 2004 there, there was a Hamid referral concerning him. It's a process by which the High Court will refer barristers who a court considers misled it, particularly in the context of urgent injunctions originally. And most of the time it's about immigration, it's about where someone applies for urgent injunction to say stop a particular flight taking off and it turns out to be frivolous. So it's unusual for someone not in immigration to be the subject of a Hamid referral. Mr. Kamal was referred because he applied for judicial review of a decision of HMRC to name a particular business as carry on an avoidance scheme. And he said in passing the matter was being considered by another court but admitted to say the other court had turned it down in fairly vehement terms when the judge discovered that he was decidedly unhappy and he made a Hamid referral. And the Hamid court found that Mister Kumar had indeed breached his duty to the court. Then in 2005, a few advisers told me that their clients have been seeing pictures from a firm called Arca Wealth. And Arca Wealth had this amazing pitch that this structure would let you sell the intellectual property in your business to an offshore trust and then you would be outside of income tax, corporation tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax in the UK and every country in Europe. By Mad Jack. There's an impossible, ridiculous promise they claimed on their website that all of their clients received an opinion for a barrister said to Kumar, the same guy I'd looked at briefly a year before. And it's kind of common for dodgy tax promoters to say that a barrister is backing them when he isn't. And maybe he spoke to the ones, maybe he's never heard of them at all. So I'm, I find myself pretty often writing to barristers saying these guys are dropping your name. And most of the time the barrister that almost all the time the barrister then writes back saying bloody hell, I told these people to stop doing that. I can't believe they're still doing it here. However, it became clear that Mister Kumar very much was involved with these guys. His exact involvement in the business isn't clear, but at one point he said that he felt he had an equity stake in it. He also recorded videos for them where he said he gave their clients an opinion. So I thought we're on fairly safe ground saying that the scheme was terrible because everyone he spoke to thought the scheme was terrible. We published 2 months later said that this had been very damaging to him and he was going to sue unless I stated that sincerely. I thought he was the leading tax lawyer in the UK and I agreed to pay him 80% of whatever amounts his clients said they were no longer paying him because the damage done by our article. It then seemed I got the impression that he really was going to sue. So I'd started the Good Law Project who agreed to act on a no win no fee basis. One morning in August I got an e-mail from the court, which is a bit unusual that Iron Tax Policy associates both both got an identical e-mail and the e-mail was an order from the court saying that the application for an injunction against me had been refused. I had no idea there was an injunction and it turns out Kamal had applied for an on notice injunction but for reasons that remain mysterious had not provided notice. Very soon after the injunction order was issued. We got the claim form and he really was suing for defamation and for £8,000,000 he claimed that he'd never written an opinion for this scheme. But then if you wrote to him saying but, but hang on, hang on, they said you'd write an opinion on the scheme and you said you'd write an opinion for all their clients. So it was, it was first mentioned, the malicious falsehood. Basically he said that I, I must have known what I was saying was false. Therefore malicious falsehood. That's not the test for malicious falsehood. You, you have to essentially show dishonesty. And even if you accept all of his pleadings, he had no evidence. Weirdest of all, he said it was false and defamatory for me to say the Hamid court had said that he had reached his duty to the court. But the Hamid court did say that wasn't complicated. It was there the two paragraphs from the end, one sentence very clear. It was like super weird. Why is he suing me for saying something is happened when it happened? I, I really wasn't sure what to do here. The Legal Victory: Strike-Out and Summary Judgment But Greg was very clear that that that we should apply to strike it out and for summary judgement and for security for costs in case anything survived and we thought we should use the anti slap just. Speaker 1 Pausing there, Dan, just for listeners aren't so familiar with even relatively basic Civil Procedure strikeout or summary judgement, similar ways of disposing of a claim before there needs to be a full trial, yes. Speaker 4 You have to show that it's certain to fail and that's why not waiving legal privilege that that that was the point of of using the anti slap rule. A braver man than I might just have gone with slap but we we went with but. Speaker 1 Now we should first of all mention that you acted for Mr. Needle in in this case. I won't ask you anything on which you wouldn't want to comment, but a few things to to pick up there. First of all, Dan succeeded on the strikeout and summary judgement applications that that he made in this particular case and on the basis necessarily on the basis the the the claim was certain to fail on on the face of the pleadings. But these are quite a high bar. It's not easy to establish is it in in advance of a trial in a general case that a claim is doomed to fail. So that means does it? That's striking out a claim because it's a slap. It is a meaningful additional tool in the Armory of somebody who's facing one of these claims. Yes, I. Speaker 2 Think so. In Dan's case, as you say, we were successful in showing that Sethu Kamal's malicious falsehood claim was hopeless and so it was struck out. And we were also successful in showing that Dan had a full defence to the the defamation claim of honest opinion. The article expressed his honest opinions on Sethu Kumal's conduct and we showed that Kumar had no real prospect of defeating that defence. And so we got summary judgement on that bit of the claim. Missus Justice Collins Rice didn't need to look at application under the SLAP law, but she did so I think because it was the first time that someone had tried to use this law and thought it would be an insightful to to give her views on that. The intention of the SLAP law is, is not only to dispose of hopeless claims. And so it does raise that threshold for claimants. And essentially, where there are SLAP features, aggressive features, that might be suing a a journalist rather than a publisher, racking up extortionate legal costs or pursuing the litigation in a really aggressive way, the burden of proof on merits is reversed. And so the claimant has to show that they are more likely than not to succeed at trial to keep their claim alive. Not all blogs and articles and social media posts will be as well researched as Dan's article was, and so a strikeout or a summary judgement application may not always be available to them. This SLAP strikeouts test does, as I say, address that balance and allow people who face the most intimidating claims to seek to strike them out on that basis. Ian, just. Speaker 1 Paying devil's advocate to some of the things that Matt was saying there, isn't it the case that the Civil Procedure rules already make provision allowing for abusive claims, which it's open to the court to interpret more expansively if it wants to? I suppose for abusive claims to be either struck out or if they're not struck out, the subject of some sort of adverse cost consequence. At the end of the of the day, are slaps really in that sense a meaningful addition, or do they just create a a further level of argument over which lawyers can argue? I don't. Speaker 3 Think they are. I think the system was already working very well. What we have a lack of is a lack of evidence from campaigners to show which particular cases they're talking about. We see various disgruntled litigants saying they've been slapped, but several of those, you know, lost cases and had damages awarded against them. The courts have been adept at disposing of weak libel cases from some time. If you look back over the last 20 years, particularly since the Jamil decision I mentioned earlier, where courts can strike out disproportionate claims. The introduction serious harm tests in the Defamation Act 2013, where a requirement was introduced to prove that the claimant suffered serious harm to their reputation. And also the effect abolition of jury trials in libel claims, which has allowed judges to make early interim decisions whether they're for strike out for abuse process or reverse summary judgement as in Dan Needles case. As Dan acknowledges, come out was a hopeless case. I saw I saw the pleading when Dan published it online, it was always going to be thrown out with or without X. So there was a clear honest opinion claim and and and and and the malicious forces claim hadn't been properly pleaded. Had had he taken specialist legal advice and maybe he did. Had he followed specialist legal advice, he would have been told it would have been hopeless. Where we may see more, you know, another slab finding in in a case that might have some merit is where perhaps where claims being bought by non specialist firm or litigants in person, that's on the increase. I mean, I still saw statistics from last year that showed that 60% of claims were issued by litigants in person, although I would say in most of those cases they're not properly pleaded and the pleadings are defective and they're liable to be struck out in any event. Well, we've. Speaker 1 Identified that a slap can't be established unless the claimants intention goes beyond what's to be expected in quotes. Properly conducted litigation. I asked Dan about how that was approached in his case and for his observations on the current state of the law on slaps more generally. Beyond Economic Crime: Debating SLAPP Law's Limitations There'd been no previous case on this. You must have had a sense that you were entering uncharted waters in that sense, particularly with this concept of what is properly conducted litigation, we very. Speaker 4 Much knew we were in uncharted waters and we've been liaising with the anti slap campaigners who are quite keen to see a case. In some ways we're a slightly unusual case of the anti slap rule because you normally think of it as a billionaire Sue Sue's a blocker or a billionaire Sue Sue's a journalist. And here there was something like equality of arms. The difficult bit is always intentionality. So in our case we could point to things that we thought were outside the normal course of. Was it properly conducted litigation? Is is, is that the phrase? So for example, applying from an injunction with notice without giving notice, making more significant and with more impact was he was suing for £8,000,000. If he'd been suing for £8000 then I would have handled it myself. That had been 80,000 lbs. Maybe I would have consulted A balanced here and there. But £8,000,000, obviously you take it extremely seriously. He was doing that because he said he had a contract which he lost which was worth £8,000,000 to him. Matt, a good Lord project rather brilliantly got hold of that contract and it was a contract to provide an opinion that a particular tax avoidance scheme worked. HMRC had spotted the scheme before we ever published our article about Mr. Kamal and began to shut it down. And if that was shut down a few months later and then the company was wound up and is in the hands of the official receiver. All of which is to say that it was not mathematically possible that Mister Kamal lost £8,000,000 for this contract, then how much would have lost? Maybe 50,000 lbs or something, but but not very much. And the judge was extremely unimpressed that he had pleaded an £8 billion loss on the base of this contract. And that I think was probably the slappiest element. Speaker 1 As far as the statutory test for slaps is concerned, that is at the moment limited to, I summarize publication alleging economic crime in in summary, and there's a, there's a substantial movement that would look to see on behalf of the cause of freedom of expression that being expanded into publications always in the public interest, but on much broader topics. This helped you out because I'm imagining quite a lot of your publication in reality will concern economic crime. But if you were in the journalistic space writing about other matters, you wouldn't currently have available to you that recourse. Any observations about that? Well, it seems. Speaker 4 Irrational. There's an awful lot of slap going on at the moment by people who are accused of serious sexual offences and there are cases I'm aware of where it very much looks like a serious sexual assault or rape took place. And in order to silence the the accuser, the laws of libel, confidence, data privacy from copyright are being employed. And that is a case where an unto slap law is absolutely needed. I think this was a particularly rubbish defamation claim which a fair person looking at would look at it and say well this is this is this is just hopeless to dispose of. This pretty obviously hopeless case cost 146,000 for me. It could easily of cost twice that I think. And this is a problem. If we are serious about slap and we should be and we're serious about free speech, then we need to make sure that a Blogger or someone without the sources can dispose of a claim like this very quickly and cheaply. There's even more than that. Even a national newspaper would hesitate to publish something which isn't of keen public interest if it knew that it was facing 300,000 lbs of costs. If we're serious about freedom of speech, then everybody, be it major media or small terms bloggers, needs the way to speedily and efficiently get rid of hopeless and egregious libel cases. The anti stack law is not bad. Speaker 1 Matt, let me pick pick up with you. Dan identifies their features, which in his case that you could point to to support your argument. This was not properly conducted litigation. So he mentions that at an early stage in the proceedings Mr. Kamal had applied for an injunction on notice, but not on notice as it were. And the fact that thanks to your great discovery, the claimant had very significantly inflated the value of his of his claimed lost to to some £8,000,000. I'm interested in whether in doing the solicitors task of ascertaining the best evidence to put the application forward as the lawyer having to prove that element, you felt clear about what the law required, I think as. Speaker 2 This was the first application under the new SLAP legislation. We of course didn't know exactly where the court was going to draw the line between properly conducted litigation and and SLAP behaviour. But that said, I think we felt relatively confident that Kamal must have crossed the line in this case. You know he's not a Kamal was not a defamation specialist and the court was prepared to accept that non specialists may make mistakes when it comes to pleading defamation cases and the rules around defamation cases in particular. But in this case, Kamal is a 20 years call barrister and yet he failed to comply with court rules that should be familiar to all barristers. Things like serving applications, rules around pleadings when you're making injunction applications. He massively inflated the value of his claim as we've mentioned and he misled the court about a judgement where he was previously found to be in breach of his duties. So we felt pretty confident and, and the judge came with us on that, that this was beyond the norm in terms of the behaviour and it couldn't, you know, couldn't be be put down to mistake. Ian, what about? Speaker 1 Dan Needle's point on scope here that he says it makes little sense to restrict slaps as they're currently restricted to claims where the publication attack is about economic crime only. And he says that's irrational. Expanding Protection: The Future of SLAPP Legislation I suppose it depends on the view that you take of slaps generally, right? If if you're if you're not so in favor of slaps, then you just say what's the thin end of the wedge if you then start increasing it to to other situations. Does he have a point though, that if one is going to have slaps at all, just limiting it to publications to do with economic crime doesn't make much sense? Yes. Speaker 3 Absolutely. I mean, my, my position is that, you know, no legislation is required and, and this legislation is pointless and it's just going to create satellite litigation. But if you are going to have it, it shouldn't be limited to economic crime. As I said earlier, the only reason it is, is because it was shoehorned in and, you know, it's sort of legislation drafted on the back of a fag packet and that's why it's really not suitable. What? Speaker 1 About Ian, the suggestion that that he makes of extending it to those accused of serious sexual offences, so preventing claims by persons who are to silence accusers. I can see that the issue of of properly conducted litigation could could be read across from one case to another. But all those cases I wonder different. In Dan's case, what the claimant was trying to silence was public interest journalism where the facts were relatively clear. But in an accusation of a sexual offence, the facts are very often not clear, aren't there? It's one person's word against another. I wonder if that does read across in that case, Ian, I think you're. Speaker 3 Right. But obviously there's a public interest in potentially circumstances on, on explaining that someone in a particular position has been the subject of allegations. I suppose I'm more generally concerned and, and and campaigners will put forward for the example of examples of survivors of sexual, sexual assault etcetera having been pursued for defamation or threatened with defamation claims. These are remotive examples, but I think we have to be a bit careful before we throw out obstacles for people who say they have been falsely accused of the most heinous crimes and making it harder for them to seek vindication. We already have a very broad Section 4, so public interest defence in Section 4 of the Defamation Act 2013, which has been applied liberally. There's a case called Cresswell a few years ago which was brought against someone who'd accused the claimant of section assault and the court was prepared to adopt A broad interpretation of public interest defence. So I think generally we need to be careful. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel here with Hitler, as you say. And he said, she said, type cases where over the centuries we've developed a legal system which, you know, still envied across the world and you have a trial to determine whether allegations are true or false. Matt, what do? Speaker 1 You think do you think there's a a a real need for anti slap legislation in cases of accusations of serious sexual offences specifically? Yes, I think. Speaker 2 So, and I think it's important that I say that this isn't a law designed to kind of kill off defamation claims, right? It's, it's designed to ensure that the most important stories that our journalists and activists tell are not killed off by the most aggressive litigants. At the moment, claims can't be struck out for abuse unless a high threshold of abuse is met. And so aggressive litigation is allowed to continue unless you can show that the merits are so bad that it justifies summary judgement or strikeout. And this law reduces that threshold a little bit to try and address the balance between the rights of those people speaking out and the rights of those who might have their privacy or their reputation damaged, where those people are also acting in a really aggressive way. And that's, and that's the important kind of distinction here. As Ian says, I don't think there's any rational basis for allowing the law to protect people who speak about economic crime but not victims of sexual violence. You know the essence for me, both Jimmy Savile Muhammad Al Fayed. They silenced their victims used using legal threats and they weren't held to account until they were dead. When it comes to speaking about sexual violence, I think we have the balance between privacy and free speech wrong in this country. Women who speak up are regularly threatened with legal claims by perpetrators or all the people who are accused. And those women are often forced in silence because they simply cannot afford to fight the resources of the person who they may have accused. The anti slap law should address that balance. And where claims are fought in a disproportionate and regressive way as opposed to, you know, non aggressive and ordinary run-of-the-mill defamation case, those people who speak out should be better protected. Yes, by the threat of strikeout for aggressive conduct, but also by that cost protection which ensures that actually where meritorious claims have been brought that they can continue. But those people who are being sued get that cost protection. I just. Speaker 3 Think there's this sort of myth perpetuated by the media that, that there was a David and Goliath thing going on here in the, in the libel courts in the UK. And it started in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine and examples were given of oligarchs using the English libel courts to silence their critics. Very emotive, topical examples. And that was the springboard for this latest attack on, on, on the law of defamation. These cases are extremely rare. If you look at the list of claimants and defendants in the, in the, in the libel courts and libel claims are very rare as well. There's only 150 or so brought each year in the whole, in the whole of England and Wales. If you look at the parties, it's all publicly available information. I've challenged campaigners to do this before. They won't do it. Analyse the parties, look at who has the power. More often than not it's it's the defendants, media organisations rather than claimants and in the examples that are being talked about, where you have a wealthy climate silencing a poor individual, there are lawyers who will act on defendant conditional fee agreements who will be queuing up to take these cases. There are after the event insurance policies available to protect against adverse cost orders. Equally good journalists, good publications. They they're not scared off by by letters from lawyers where they've got a story that will stand up. Yeah, our fired Southall should have been exposed in their lifetimes. Harvey Weinstein was and numerous other people have been since I undertake the friend of work undertake publication work. And I will say go ahead publish if if you can back this up. So I would rather see, you know, good journalists and good publishers standing on their stories and saying, oh, we've been slapped, we've been gagged, you know, just have the courage to publish. If you can stand on your story. It's, it's just too easy to say slapped. It's, it's a wild card, you know, defend it on on substantive grounds that the. Speaker 1 Suggestion is that the law then already strikes the right balance. I don't. Speaker 2 Think Dan will mind me saying, but we genuinely did not know if our honest opinion, full defence to the defamation claim would succeed and we genuinely thought that we were going to need this slap law to be able to defeat the claim. And and so I do think there is an important space for this legislation to protect important really well researched, you know, publications like Dan. Now I hear Ian's point about publishers being able to back up what they say and defend the truth of it and so on. But for individuals in particular rather than the major media publishers, the cost of going to trial and finding lawyers can be extortionate. And I'm sure there may be lawyers that can, that will support a case on a, on a CFA. But in cases, for example, where it is one person's word against another, that can be quite tricky. And I don't think that and those defendants Cfas are as easily available as as has been suggested tested there. I think it is really difficult. We're a not-for-profit and we do provide defendant Cfas, but only because, you know, we have supporters donating to good law projects coffers. And so we can take that risk. But other firms, you know, may not be able to take that commercial gamble on racking up 250 grand of, you know, solicitor fees going all the way to trial in a case where the facts may not become totally clear until you get to the end. I hear the point that there are not a tonne of slap cases every year, certainly not in the courts. You know, there are only 150 cases for defamation issued every year. So the number of slaps are only going to be a handful or a dozen. It's not going to be significant numbers. But I think the other important benefit of this legislation is the impact it has on pre action correspondence because it gives solicitors but also claimants generally food for thought about how they interact with defendants and how they pursue claims and doing so more thoughtfully. So not to, you know, exerts aggression and intimidation that might just force someone to back down and concede. Perhaps things are starting to change, but the law, I think, is important to address the balance where those exhibitors of aggression and intimidation above and beyond the norm are in place. Can I just? Speaker 3 Start so just quick if the mischief is occurring before court and and, and, and it's trying to intimidate people and not actually sue them to get to get them, you know not to publish how having provisions that only apply when you're in court are effective. Surely you know the the mischief you're chasing is isn't in court, it's happening earlier and so how is actor and and and similar to social art going to to help solicitors? Speaker 2 Need to think about those next steps and we'll always have to be thinking about the litigation that could follow if they're instructed to issue and aggressive correspondence, lengthy letters, daily letters, whatever it might be that might, that might swing that ballot. It will give solicitors reason to discuss with their clients whether the approach that they're taking is reasonable, oppressive, intimidating. When you're facing perhaps an individual with limited financial resources or an individual who says they need more time to find a solicitor or whatever it might be. Those factors will be relevant in the litigation if ultimately issued. And so claimants and the solicitors will have to think about what that correspondence looks like. Matt A. Speaker 1 Campaign is carrying on at the moment to extend the current statutory anti slap provision. Do you think it will succeed? Crystal ball gazing there. I know what what would you like to see yourself there? There's. Speaker 2 An organization called the UK Anti Slap Coalition, and that coalition is made-up of, yes, media publishers like the newspapers in in the UK, but it's also made-up of individual lawyers and civil society organisations, free speech organisations and others who think it's really important that these anti slap provisions are extended to others outside of those speaking about economic crime. I think the courts should be able to look at all of the circumstances, look at, you know, the features of abuse and look at also the seriousness of the allegations that might have been made and look at it all in the round and go, is this abusive? Is this a beyond the norm? And if it is, I don't think intention is necessary. I think a case should be labeled as a slap regardless of intention, if the abusive features are there. And then of course, the court will look at merits and go, OK, well. And if the merits are good for the claimant, the claim should continue. But if the merits there, you know, if the, if the claimant can show that they are able to succeed or they're more likely to succeed than not, then the claim can continue, but the the defendant will get cost. But if the merits aren't there, then the case should be struck out. I think the other thing that I would be really keen, and the Coalition is keen on MPs looking at is about exemplary damages too. Because where there is a slap claim such as the one brought by Seti Kamal, you know, you might get your costs and you should get your costs on the indemnity basis. But we often see or we, we we sometimes see really aggressive litigants who have huge amounts of wealth. And in that case our costs award might not be sufficient to deter that conduct in future. And so exemplary damages for abusing the courts process in that way I think should be on the cards. Ian, if. Speaker 1 Change is to be made. What would you like to see that look like? Or or should no change be made I. Speaker 3 Think you know this? This happens every 10 years or so. The media have a go trying to soften defamation laws and the politicians of the day are terrified of upsetting them. And there is intensive lobbying and briefing of MPs. There is not a cogent evidential basis for legislation. There are far more important things the government should be doing. I don't think the current legislation addresses the mischief that that the maths talking about if, if such mischief exists in any meaningful way, there needs to be proper evidence gathering that needs to be beyond anecdotal and the Law Commission is is is well suited to do that, as David Lammy suggested a couple of years ago when our Commission should look at this and I think that that that needs to be the first step before any further reform. Speaker 1 Well, we'll have to wait and see. As always, the end to this podcast and this is no exception. But for today, Matt Gill and Ian Wilson, thank you very much for cross examining with me. Thank. Speaker 3 You both thanks SO. Speaker 2 Much we've reached. Speaker 1 The end of the podcast, but we'll be back soon and we'd love to know what you'd like us to examine next. Tell us what you're interested in or concerned about in the world of law by emailing Tom at crossexamination.co.uk. Remember to follow us wherever you get your podcasts and if you've got time, we'd love a positive review on Apple Podcasts. It's the best way to spread the word about cross examination. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.