Michael Napier CBE QC steps down as chairman of Irwin Mitchell this month after 40 years at the firm.
It’s the end of one long chapter in a career packed with more events than an army of lawyers combined. LB celebrates the career of our 2012 Lawyer of the Year.
Michael Napier recently returned, as a man on the brink of retirement from his beloved Irwin Mitchell, to the place where it all began: Loughborough Grammar School. He was there to speak to sixth formers about pursuing a career in the law. It was there as a 15-year-old schoolboy that Napier kept a programme of Robert Bolt’s play A Man for all Seasons and began his love affair with the law.
Fifty years later, Napier recalls being particularly drawn to the famous exchange in the play between Sir Thomas More and William Roper, where More says he’d even represent the devil if needs be.
‘I remember reading the words: “I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake” and they struck a particular chord with me,’ he says. ‘It’s difficult to say this without sounding trite but the need to redress injustice has always been a driving force in me.’
He is keen to point out that, in addition to visiting his old school, last month he also took a group of young lawyers to speak to pupils at the Pimlico Academy (one of the Labour academies) about opportunities to pursue a career in the law as part of Irwin Mitchell’s social responsibility programme.
One word that doesn’t readily associate with Napier is ‘trite’. He picked up the Lawyer of the Year Award at the 2012 Legal Business Awards, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the legal profession. For the sake of completeness, here’s a brief, non-exhaustive, recap. Senior partner of Irwin Mitchell, 1983 to 2012. Joint founder, secretary and then President of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers. Law Society President 2000 to 2001. CBE in 2005. Attorney-General’s pro bono envoy since 2002. Vice chair of The Thalidomide Trust. Former member of the Mental Health Act Commission. Widely regarded as having written the book on conditional fee arrangements and established the framework for group actions in the UK. The list goes on.
‘’Michael is a first class lawyer and a defender of the rights of the individual. He’s been an outstanding partner and his example has inspired a vast number of lawyers.’
But Napier is not a man to wear his achievements on his sleeve: that much is obvious from speaking to him. Despite all his successes, he doesn’t take himself too seriously. When asked what he dislikes the most about himself, he replies: ‘big ears’.
When asked to recall a favourite story from his career, he tells of the time he received a call from a client on April Fool’s Day, saying she was being threatened with eviction because she owned a rock python. To his surprise, the client later arrived with a genuine case and a genuine rock python, both of which landed on his desk.
When news of his impending retirement appeared on thelawyer.com in November, comments below the story included those from the managing partner of Irwin Mitchell’s Manchester office Grahame Codd, who said: ‘An inspirational leader, a pioneering lawyer, a great litigator, Mike always led from the front but equally was quick to give opportunities to colleagues at all levels.’ But it was the comment from his secretary of 22 years, Kita Whitehead, which perhaps provides the most telling insight into the man: ‘He was a tremendous boss, highly respected by all his clients and staff from the youngest office junior to his fellow partners. He would work tirelessly, sometimes to the point of exhaustion for clients who desperately needed his expertise from the “man in the street” through to the large corporate cases. Later, he gave the same dedication to other channels of the law he became involved in. Since I retired I have followed his career closely and have been proud and amazed (but not surprised) at his achievements.’
Leslie Perrin, the former managing partner of Osborne Clarke and now chairman of litigation funder Calunius Capital, worked with Napier recently on the Civil Justice Council’s Working Group on Third Party Funding, which Napier chaired and says: ‘There is no side to Mike at all. He’s always been dominated by a truly professional mentality. His clients always came first.’
But as anyone who has crossed swords with him in litigation will testify, he has rightly earned his reputation as one of the most accomplished disputes lawyers of his time. ‘There are two common beliefs about me,’ says Napier. ‘One is that I’m a softie and another is that I’m a toughie. In fact both are true.’
Early years
A graduate of Manchester University, Napier articled at Moss Toone & Deane in Loughborough before spending two years as an assistant in the Manchester office of trade union specialists Thompsons Solicitors. When he joined Irwin Mitchell in 1972, it was a small firm of three partners in Sheffield. Now the firm has 570 lawyers, more than 2,000 staff and revenues of £172m.
A landmark moment came in his early years as a criminal lawyer. Irwin Mitchell opened on a Saturday back in 1974 and one morning Napier received a call from a custody sergeant saying Mr X, a former Broadmoor patient, had asked for him. This was the start of X v United Kingdom, a landmark case that finally ended in 1981 and saw Napier become the first solicitor advocate to appear before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The case established a precedent securing meaningful tribunal rights for detained mental patients and laid the foundations for key legislative change in the Mental Health Act 1983.
‘We had exhausted all options in the UK and needed to seek leave to appeal in Europe,’ says Napier. ‘I applied for legal aid and ended up with a small amount of French francs. When I said that I would need extra legal aid for a barrister, I was told that they didn’t recognise our anomalous dual-profession model and there would only be funds for one advocate. That turned out to be me.’
Napier describes his 31-year-old self as a ‘Magistrates Court hack’, representing his client against such auspicious company as Harry Woolf, now Lord Woolf, who was First Treasury Counsel at the time and Simon Brown (now Lord Brown). He says he was lucky in that he was helped significantly by co-counsel Larry Gostin, who is now a leading law professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC but was then the legal director of the mental health charity MIND. Napier also notes that the barristers treated the young solicitor advocate ‘with absolute courtesy and respect’. It wasn’t until after the case finished that the clerk, Harvey Kruger, told Napier that he was the first solicitor to appear before the ECHR.
It was the start of a career littered with prestigious cases, including Blackburn v Newcastle Health Authority in 1987, where he represented the successful claimant in a clinical negligence action that led to the introduction of specialist panels of solicitors to handle personal injury and clinical negligence claims. In 1990 he appeared in the European Court of Justice in Barber v Guardian Royal Exchange, which resulted in equal pension rights and a raft of anti-discrimination legislation and equal opportunities law throughout Europe.
There was no shortage of high-profile, catastrophic cases that required not only a first-rate legal mind but also some empathy and humility. To this day he keeps a huge book that details every single one of the cases he has handled since day one at Irwin Mitchell. Napier acted for the families of the 193 people who died in the Herald of Free Enterprise ferry disaster in 1987 and then acted for the 51 survivors and families of victims of the Marchioness riverboat disaster in 1989.
Two of those landmark cases and both of those horrific events occurred while he was joint founding partner of Pannone Napier, the specialist multi-party action firm set up as a joint venture in 1985 between Napier and Rodger Pannone of Pannone & Partners. The venture, which was the first of its kind, pioneered the development of group litigation for victims of many of the major transport and product liability disasters of the time in the UK and internationally. However, Napier’s only ‘name’ practice dissolved in 1994.
‘It’s difficult to say this without sounding trite but the need to redress injustice has always been a driving force in me.’
Rodger Pannone and Napier played a significant part in changing the complexion of UK claimant law firms and Napier credits his partnership with Pannone with having perhaps the single biggest influence on his career. He is quick to credit his wife too, ‘who has kept my feet on the ground’.
Other names that Napier counts as ‘inspiration’ include Lord Bingham, ‘for his jurisprudence on the rule of law’;
Tom Sargent, the first secretary of the charity JUSTICE; American political activist and attorney Ralph Nader, ‘willing to fight for the underdog’; Sir Ian Kennedy, for his Reith lectures on personal injury and clinical negligence in the early 1980s; Sir Louis Blom-Cooper QC, for ‘having one of the best independent and challenging legal minds of his generation’; Lord Woolf, for his civil justice reforms; and Walter Irwin Mitchell, for founding the firm.
Neil Kinsella, chief executive of Russell Jones & Walker, was the first solicitor in the so-called ‘disaster practice’ of Pannone Napier in the 1980s. He recalls Napier giving him the opportunity to be involved in some of the most serious legal issues of the day which led him to become a partner while only in his twenties. This included dealing successfully with cases on behalf of the families of oil workers who were killed in a helicopter crash off Aberdeen and the Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea.
Kinsella says he was at the BBC with Napier in the mid-1980s to provide balance to an interview it was doing in the wake of the Manchester Air Disaster when a US attorney named Arthur Daly was trying to sign families of victims to agreements that would have given away a substantial share of any compensation. Napier was interviewed and Arthur Daly returned to the US without any clients. The case was later concluded successfully with Pannone and Napier heading the negotiating team for the vast majority of claimants in a groundbreaking settlement.
‘His legacy to other lawyers is that good values and a commercial instinct are both vital ingredients to making access to justice a reality,’ says Kinsella.
Pannone says fondly: ‘Michael is a first class lawyer and a defender of the rights of the individual. He’s been an outstanding partner and his example has inspired a vast number of lawyers.’
The contribution that Napier has made to group litigation and access to justice for the disadvantaged cannot be overstated. As Perrin points out: ‘Michael changed the approach of claimant firms in the UK to something much more entrepreneurial, a book building sort of approach and through that changed the practice of law in the country. He succeeded by making solicitors move out to the market rather than waiting for the market to come to them. They were aggressive, proactive and innovative in the way they went about business. They sold the idea that plaintiffs could obtain remedies in those terrible circumstances. Some of his detractors might say it was a short step from there to ambulance chasing but I don’t think Michael ever fell into that trap.’
It was this professional, commercial approach to an area of law that had previously been the preserve of the desperate and the guileless that set Napier on the path to becoming a pioneering law firm manager as well an exceptional litigator. He started what has today become Irwin Mitchell’s signature national practice: personal injury, clinical negligence and group litigation, before taking over as head of the firm in 1983. Under his leadership, the firm blossomed into what it is today: a prime example of a truly innovative law firm; an industry pioneer with its plans to convert to an alternative business structure (ABS) before many rivals have even considered it.
Dark side
When your career is as full as Napier’s has been, it is inevitable that there will be darker moments. One obvious blip is 2009, which in some sense could be considered his annus horribilis. Napier tried and failed to injunct Private Eye magazine after it sought to publish details of a complaint against him over an alleged conflict of interest in a pro bono matter he handled in the 1990s and criticisms of the Law Society’s handling of that complaint. In the well-documented case, Mr Justice Eady ruled that one of Napier’s former clients owed no duty of confidentiality and was free to speak to Private Eye about the case. The outcome, which Eye editor Ian Hislop later told a House of Commons Select Committee would have cost around £400,000 had Private Eye lost, was over two paragraphs of copy and led to Napier stepping down from his role on the Legal Services Board that year.
Napier has never spoken to the press about this and is keen not to open old wounds again. He simply says: ‘It was a tough decision to challenge Private Eye but I believed it was correct in law at the time because the complaint proceedings were confidential. The outcome confirms that my professional integrity remains untarnished. With hindsight, challenging Private Eye brought attention to the issue but I have no regrets in representing the client to the best of my ability as I did, having been successful pro bono in the Privy Council.’
‘It is sometimes said that pro bono should be in the DNA of every lawyer and I think it always has been in my case.’
Despite all this Napier says this wasn’t the biggest disappointment of his career, which was the failure of the benzodiazepine group litigation because of the withdrawal of legal aid. ‘The failure of the case had less to do with the merits than the cost/benefit ratio, which was an early introduction of the issue of proportionality in civil litigation,’ says Napier.
It is this willingness to fight the cause for the underdog that has meant pro bono work has played a massive role in his life. Back in the seventies one of the first things Napier did on joining Irwin Mitchell was to help set up a Citizens Advice Bureau in Pitsmoor, Sheffield, which is still open today. In 2002 he became the Attorney General’s special envoy for pro bono, an office he is extremely proud of and intends to carry on with after leaving the firm.
‘It is sometimes said that pro bono should be in the DNA of every lawyer and I think it always has been in my case,’ he says. ‘We can confidently say today that the pro bono movement extends across all branches of the legal profession. However hard the profession tries, there will always be room to do more. Pro bono is not a substitute for legal aid and it cannot fill the gap.’
This theme of fighting for the weaker party runs through Napier’s career and is in his blood. When asked how he would describe himself, Napier replies: ‘fair’. When asked for one word he would like others to use to describe him, the answer is also ‘fair’. On the subject of how he would like to be remembered, he replies: ‘intolerant of injustice’.
Moving on
Napier will remain in the law despite not being at Irwin Mitchell. He will keep his role as vice chair of The Thalidomide Trust and is setting himself up as a consultant. He will be available for non-executive roles in the City, at law firms or any entity that has an ABS interest.
Whatever else he does, it is clear that Napier still has much to offer. Having brought Irwin Mitchell to the brink of being an ABS, Napier has seen and done it all. He’s quite clear on the challenge facing law firm managers in the future. ‘I used to say to my partners “this is a partnership that has to be run as a business”,’ he says. ‘As the years went by I changed that around to “this is a business that happens to be run as a partnership”. I think I would now say that this is a business that has to be run as a business.’
And his advice to any new law firm managing partner coming in? That’s simple: ‘Recruit people that are better than you are and keep your sense of humour.’
‘Recruit people that are better than you are and keep your sense of humour.’
Above his desk at work, Napier has a picture of Irwin Mitchell, the man whose name the firm bears (Irwin Mitchell is one of the very few firms that carry the full name of their only founder). In the picture, Mitchell is wearing a trilby hat at a jaunty angle and looks every bit the maverick. Recent research by Napier (2012 is Irwin Mitchell’s centenary year ) has revealed that the firm’s founder was a major figure in Sheffield during his lifetime and Napier says Mitchell would be one of his ideal guests at a dinner for lawyers past and present. Others around the table would be the late Lord Bingham to discuss his book The Rule of Law which ‘should be compulsory for all law students’; the late Gilbert Gray QC, ‘the funniest raconteur of his generation’; Sir Ian Kennedy to discuss his seminal Reith lectures ‘The Unmasking of Medicine’ ; Sir Louis Blom- Cooper QC ‘to challenge every argument’ ; and finally… The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
While Irwin Mitchell has rightly earned his place in history as the original architect of the firm, no-one has given more of themselves and made more of a contribution to its success than Michael Napier. LB
mark.mcateer@legalease.co.uk