Background
Lexlaw Limited, a firm of solicitors, acted for Arran Coghlan and Claire Burgoyne under a conditional fee agreement (CFA) dated 16 May 2018 in a professional negligence action. The clients had previously been defendants in a civil recovery claim brought by the Serious Organised Crime Agency over a property alleged to have been acquired with drug-trafficking proceeds; the professional negligence claim arose from alleged mismanagement of that earlier litigation. The CFA was terminated by the clients on 27 February 2020, whereupon Athena Law took over. Lexlaw immediately asserted a solicitor’s lien over the file for unpaid invoices totalling approximately £7,930. In email exchanges that followed, Athena Law offered a solicitor’s undertaking to preserve Lexlaw’s position and procure payment at the conclusion of the case; Lexlaw declined to accept those terms and instead demanded an undertaking in different terms.
On 21 May 2020 Lexlaw sent a formal lien notice (“the Lien Letter”) to BLM, the solicitors acting for the defendants in the underlying professional negligence claim. The letter asserted an equitable lien over “the fruits of the litigation” in the amount of £93,259.62—a figure that included a success fee under the CFA—put BLM on notice that settlement sums must not be released to the former clients without discharging that amount, and warned that any payment in disregard of the notice would be unconscionable. The professional negligence claim was ultimately settled in May 2022, with a sum retained by the clients’ then-solicitors pending resolution of the lien dispute.
The clients commenced the Lien Claim in the High Court on 21 May 2021, pleading four causes of action arising from the Lien Letter: defamation, breach of confidence, breach of fiduciary duty, and breach of the GDPR. The defamation claim was dismissed on a preliminary issue in June 2023 ([2023] EWHC 1453 (KB)) and the claim against Lexlaw’s senior partner was struck out for lack of jurisdiction. The three remaining claims—breach of confidentiality, breach of fiduciary duty, and GDPR—were transferred to the County Court at Central London.
The Court’s Holding
His Honour Judge Monty KC dismissed Lexlaw’s application for summary judgment (or strike-out) on 29 May 2025. He found all three remaining claims at least “reasonably arguable.” On the confidentiality and fiduciary duty claims, the Judge drew on Lord Millett’s speech in Bolkiah v KPMG [1999] 2 AC 222, accepting that while a fiduciary relationship ends on termination of the retainer, the duty to protect confidential information survives it. He considered it arguable that disclosing the clients’ affairs—particularly the alleged debt amount—to an adverse third party could constitute a post-termination breach of that duty, especially if the stated sum was not properly owed. He also found it arguable that the CFA’s own terms (specifically Clause 17.2, which provided that the lien “may be applied after the agreement ends unless another solicitor working for you undertakes to pay us what we are owed”) required Lexlaw to accept Athena Law’s offered undertaking, meaning the Lien Letter should not have been sent at all. On the GDPR claim, the Judge found it arguable that processing the clients’ personal data in a notice asserting an inflated or legally unsupported figure violated the accuracy and lawful-processing principles.
Lexlaw appealed to the High Court (Chancery Division) before Mr Justice Edwin Johnson, with permission granted by Foxton J on 17 October 2025 on the basis that it was realistically arguable the Judge below had failed to address the case as actually pleaded and instead considered an unpleaded case arguable. Before Edwin Johnson J, Lexlaw abandoned its third ground of appeal concerning the summary assessment of costs at £27,500, accepting it lacked materials to challenge the judge’s costs discretion—a concession the appeal judge regarded as correctly made, given the high bar for appellate interference with a first-instance costs assessment. The substantive appeal (Grounds One and Two) concerned whether the Judge erred in law in concluding that any of the three remaining claims disclosed a reasonable prospect of success on the pleadings as they stood.
Key Takeaways
- A solicitor’s duty of confidentiality to a former client survives termination of the retainer; it is at least arguable that a lien notice sent to opposing solicitors asserting an inaccurate or legally unsupported debt figure can constitute a post-retainer breach of that continuing duty.
- The terms of a CFA can restrict the solicitor’s right to assert and enforce an equitable lien: a clause making the lien conditional on the incoming solicitor failing to offer an undertaking may oblige the former solicitor to accept a reasonable undertaking rather than proceed to notify third parties.
- Including a success fee in an equitable lien notice when that fee was not yet payable under the CFA (because no “win” had been achieved) may render the notice legally defective and independently ground a GDPR claim for inaccurate processing of the client’s personal data.
- Appellate challenges to a first-instance judge’s summary assessment of costs face a high threshold; Lexlaw’s concession on Ground Three illustrates that merely asserting arithmetical error is unlikely to suffice without detailed materials to support the challenge.
Why It Matters
This case puts solicitors on notice that the exercise of an equitable lien—and in particular the sending of a lien notice to third parties such as opposing solicitors—is not a risk-free step that can be taken mechanically upon termination of a retainer. Courts are willing to scrutinise both the legal basis and the factual accuracy of any sum asserted in such a notice. Where the sum claimed improperly includes a success fee not yet triggered, or where the CFA itself conditions the lien on the incoming solicitor’s failure to offer a satisfactory undertaking, the former solicitor may face claims in confidentiality, fiduciary duty, and data protection rather than simply enforcing payment.
The intersection of equitable lien law with the GDPR is a notable development. A lien letter sent to an opposing party necessarily processes the former client’s personal data; if the data (such as the debt figure) is inaccurate or the processing lacks a lawful basis, the GDPR provides an independent avenue of redress. Solicitors should therefore verify both the legal entitlement to assert a lien and the accuracy of any financial figures before giving third-party notice, and should carefully consider the terms of any CFA governing what happens on client termination.