High Court Finds Manchester Law Firm Ratio Law Negligent Over Deleted Charge Text, Ordering £100,000 in Damages to Investment Company Client
His Honour Judge Stephen Davies, sitting as a High Court judge in Manchester, has found Ratio Law, a Manchester law firm, liable in professional negligence and ordered it to pay £100,000 plus interest to its former client, MPP (Services) Ltd, an investment company. The negligence arose from a simple drafting error. MPP and Lesley Hearne had entered a joint venture to acquire and operate children's care homes, following two failed earlier attempts that cost MPP around £180,000. The parties agreed to place a charge on Ms Hearne's property for that amount, to be released if the care home opened. Ratio Law's co-founder, Gisela Alberici, was instructed to check a draft legal charge in the standard CH1 form prepared by MPP. Ms Alberici removed the words specifying the sum secured (a second charge of £180,000 payable within 24 months) from panel 9 of the charge without replacing them. As a consequence, the executed charge contained no statement of the sum secured. When the joint venture collapsed and a dispute arose, Ms Hearne successfully argued that the charge was void for uncertainty. MPP's new solicitors and counsel accepted that this defence was unanswerable, and MPP agreed at a mediation to cancel registration of the charge. Ratio Law admitted the deletion was a breach of duty. The trial proceeded on issues including the scope of duty, causation, and loss of chance. HHJ Davies found Ms Alberici to be an unimpressive witness whose evidence was unreliable, concluding that she had not been paying proper attention to the matter and was doing the bare minimum to retain an existing client. The court's award of £100,000 reflects its assessment of the loss of chance resulting from the negligent execution of the charge.
Why this matters
This case is a pointed reminder that professional negligence liability can arise from elementary drafting errors, not only from complex legal misjudgements. The fact that the error was a deletion of specific words from a standard-form document, in a matter the partner treated as low-priority, illustrates how inattention to transactional detail can render an entire security arrangement void. The case is also notable for the court's loss of chance analysis: because the charge was void, MPP lost the opportunity to enforce security worth £180,000, and the £100,000 award reflects a probabilistic assessment of what MPP might have recovered had the charge been correctly executed. For law firms, the case reinforces the importance of supervision and document review protocols, particularly when partners are handling straightforward matters for existing clients under time pressure.
On the Ground
Professional negligence claims against law firms activate litigation and dispute resolution practices on both sides: the claimant's solicitors build the case around breach of duty, causation, and quantum, while the defendant's team focuses on scope of retainer, contributory negligence, and limiting the loss of chance assessment. This case would have required disclosure review and categorisation of the firm's file, preparation of witness statement bundles, chronology preparation, and costs schedule management. For trainees on a professional negligence matter, tasks include organising disclosure into categories by relevance, preparing court bundles for trial, and assisting with the research underlying skeleton arguments on loss of chance methodology. The case also has risk management implications: firms may need to update compliance gap analysis memos and internal supervision protocols in light of the judgment.
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“In a professional negligence claim against a solicitor for a drafting error that rendered a security document void, how would you approach the causation and loss of chance arguments on behalf of the claimant?”
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