The dark money shielding corporate wrongdoing

Fair Civil Justice claims it wants to protect consumers from lawyers. But Good Law Project can reveal it is in fact funded by dark money and seeks to shield big business from legal accountability.

Fair Civil Justice was set up in 2022 and describes its mission as: 

“Preserving the fairness and transparency of British civil justice is at the heart of our campaign. The increasing presence of a predatory claims culture – one that is opaque, poorly regulated and in favour of lawyers and funders – is harmful to consumers, employers and Britain.”

That all sounds like a good thing – right?

The site doesn’t state who funds it, but Fair Civil Justice was set up by an affiliate of the US Chamber of Commerce. The British Chambers of Commerce also admits to being a member, stating – with commendable frankness – that it wants “to protect businesses across our UK network”. “Fair Civil Justice” appears to be the successor organisation to “Justice Not Profit,” a now defunct organisation which was also funded by the US Chamber of Commerce to “oppose the government’s introduction of US-style ‘class action’ lawsuits into the UK legal system”.

Its website seems to be multiply unlawful. 

It collects personal data through email addresses, but it does not appear to be registered with the ICO. And what you won’t find anywhere on its website is any detail of its legal status, or identity, or funders.

The organisation – if that is what it is – is run by Seema Kennedy, a protégé of Peter Mandelson at Global Counsel. Remarkably, she continues to sit on the Board of Ofwat, whose obligations include ensuring “that water companies can (in particular through securing reasonable returns on their capital) finance the proper carrying out of their statutory functions”. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in the United Utilities case, in which Good Law Project funded an intervention, water companies now face “a tide of legal challenges.” Or maybe not – if Seema gets her way.

We believe its real purpose has nothing to do with “fairness” and its claim to care about transparency is – given its dark money funding – an ugly piece of gaslighting. We believe Fair Civil Justice is about shielding corporate wrongdoing from legal accountability.

The consequence of our rules on costs, where the loser has to pay the winners’ costs – which can run into tens or hundreds of millions of pounds – is that corporates can ignore with impunity the legal rights and protections given to regular people. The risk of bankruptcy if you lose means that, often, there is simply no way to hold huge US multinationals to account for their lawbreaking. 

The only way in which consumers can protect their rights against Big Oil or Big Tech or Big Pharma is to club together through group litigation. And it is this which – as Fair Civil Justice’s predecessor’s website nakedly admits – it is trying to disrupt. This is an outcome hugely expedient, of course, to the businesses that fund the US Chamber of Commerce.

We do not say that the rules governing group claims function well. They are in need of urgent reform. And there is a strong case, too, to be made for extending the protections against adverse costs to claims made against private companies in the public interest, so that accountability can be delivered without the need to secure financial backing.

But so-called “Fair Civil Justice” is a rogue player with an ugly, disguised agenda.