A solicitor sent more than 240 legal letters to schools across the country making misleading threats over the use of Covid-19 face masks, lateral flow tests and vaccinations, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal heard today.
Lois Yvonne Bayliss, admitted in 2006, made threats that the recipients would face civil and/or criminal liability if they required face masks to be worn in schools, carried out routine lateral flow tests or facilitated the Covid-vaccination programme for children aged 12-17, the Solicitors Regulation Authority said.
The letters were written on Bayliss’s firm’s headed paper, with covering emails from the firm’s email address, and were sent to 247 schools and academies. Bayliss is also alleged to have encouraged 48 other people to send similar letters.
Bayliss, of Sheffield-based Broad Yorkshire Law, argues that the letters were not legally threatening and that she had no intention of issuing any legal claim. The SDT panel heard that Bayliss accepted she had sent the letters or made them available to others to send – but had not written them.
For the SRA, Benjamin Tankel said though Bayliss maintained she was ‘not trying to threaten anyone at all’, the letters were ‘at least passive-aggressive about saying “we will continue to await your response to this polite letter”.’
He added: ‘The SRA would say receiving letters of this kind from a lawyer on headed paper…[with] requests to comply, no-one is going to read that as a polite notice.
‘By [Bayliss’] own evidence she had no subjective intention to bring a legal claim and yet the letters give the distinct impression that a legal claim is in contemplation because the recipients will have received this unsolicited lawyer’s letter, the terms are legalistic, there are references to legal liability.
‘The email address is a claims [one], on firm-headed notepaper, it says “please get back to us”. The letters are presenting themselves as there is a legal claim in contemplation when on the respondent’s own evidence there was no such thing. This is an attempt to obtain more credit [or] weight for the respondent [and] the promotion of the respondent’s views.
‘Miss Bayliss was not instructed by any clients to bring these challenges, [it is] just to give her own view.’
Tankel told the tribunal that lawyers could ‘publish on their website or Twitter feed or LinkedIn saying “This is my view, teachers may wish to be aware that there are these legal risks” as long as that is done in a proper way’. He added: ‘It is entirely legitimate to publish a blogpost on a point of law, or write to her MP, go to a protest…there are a number of other options that were available to Miss Bayliss rather than bringing these challenges in the way that she did.
‘Miss Bayliss chose to use the tools that were available to her as a member of the profession to lend her view weight…and to put an end to the vaccination programme.’
Conceding that ‘Miss Bayliss meant well’, he continued: ‘She was trying to prevent what she saw was avoidable harm to many children and I do not think there would be many people that would say that is not an objectively morally good aim but, however strong her moral convictions were, that did not justify her going about making misleading and improper statements with a view to putting her own views and beliefs above government policy.’
The four-day hearing continues.
