I was very fortunate to be given the opportunity to undertake a work experience placement at Matrix. Upon entering and being given a short tour of the premises by Lindsay Clarke, I was immediately struck by the friendly welcoming atmosphere in the chambers. Matrix is a chamber known for its diverse practice, so my work experience involved working with many different teams and exploring many different areas of law from tort law to competition law. Working through tasks with the two fellow students who were undertaking the work experience placement with me, allowed me to connect with others who were interested in pursuing a similar career.
The first task involved researching different funding sources for the finance team. There are many complicated rules in this area and my research led me to a variety of sources. The main piece of legislation in this area is the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, but there were many relevant pieces of secondary legislation in this area as well including the Civil Legal Aid (Merits Criteria) Regulations 2013, the Civil Legal Aid (Financial Resources and Payment for Services) Regulations 2013, the Conditional Fee Agreements Order 2013, and the Criminal Legal Aid (Financial Resources) Regulations 2013. We only had 200 words to summarise each type of funding which made it difficult to fit in all the information but sticking to this word limit allowed me to get better at picking out the most important points from lots of detailed information. I learnt lots of interesting information in the research process like how anyone who has been charged with a criminal offence and detained is eligible for non-means tested Police Station Advice and Assistance from a ‘duty solicitor’ under section 58 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984; there is a Defence Solicitor Call Centre available 24 hours a day. It was also really fascinating to see the interaction between the regulations and the case law on the assessment of damages. For example, the claimant cannot recover the success fee for a conditional fee agreement as costs from the defendants, but, following Simmons v Castle, the Court of Appeal set guidelines that the level of damages in tort should be 10% higher than before to partly offset this.
Another interesting task involved examining the Defamation Act 2013 and its application to the case of Vardy v Rooney which Hugh Tomlinson KC and Sara Mansoori had acted in. We did not have much time to read about the case before our group discussion, but this allowed me to practice the skill of researching effectively and being able to quickly distil the necessary information. The part of the case we researched was the preliminarily ruling on what the natural and ordinary meaning born by the words complained of was. I found the case particularly engaging and read the full judgment at home to gain a better understanding of it. This allowed me to get a better understanding of the technical terminology used. For example, the main issue in the judgment was whether the words bore a Chase Level 1 meaning (as Ms Vardy the complainant contended) or a Chase Level 2 meaning (as Ms Rooney the defendant contended). These terms come from the case of Chase v Desormeaux with Level 1 meaning the imputation is that the claimant has done the act in question and Level 2 meaning that the imputation is that reasonable grounds exist to suspect the claimant of the act in question. The claimant was successful on this preliminary issue, but the defendant ultimately prevailed in the full trial by relying on the defence that her statement was substantially true under section 2 of the Defamation Act 2013.
On Wednesday and Thursday, we were able to watch Nicholas Gibson in action in the Competition Appeals Tribunal; he was acting for the class representative in Mark McLaren Class Representative Limited v MOL (Europe Africa) Ltd and Others. Aside from getting lost on the way there, this was a really enjoyable experience. The case in question involved a deep-sea fishing cartel where competitors had fixed prices and divided customers amongst themselves in breach of competition law. In particular, this was a follow-on collective action, which means the European Commission has already determined that the companies were involved in cartel behaviour and fined them, but there is a follow-on private action by the end-consumers (through the class representative). In these private actions, the objective is to assess the damage the claimants have suffered by comparing the price they did pay to the price they would have paid in the counterfactual world where the cartel did not exist. This is an area plagued with evidential difficulties since answering the question requires lots of data to analyse and is affected by many complicated economic factors (which was explored in a lecture I watched in the evening on Assessing Antitrust Damages in Follow-on Actions Against Cartels by Professor Wolfgang Wurmnest). It is even more difficult in a case such as this where even if you have determined the amount of overcharge that resulted from the cartel behaviour, you then have to determine how much of this overcharge was passed on to the end consumer. The claimants were arguing for a silo pricing model which means the delivery charge is mainly treated separately from other aspects of the price and the increased costs from any overcharge are simply passed on to the consumer. In contrast, the defendants were arguing for an overall pricing model. This means that the delivery is not treated differently from the other aspects of the price which is determined according to a complex mix of factors such as trying to achieve an optically attractive price (and thus the overcharge by the cartel will not necessarily have altered the price eventually paid by the consumer). During the two days, we heard testimony from three different industry experts involved in car dealing. I certainly know I lot more about this industry than before and learnt lots of technical terms like the OEN (original equipment manufacturer). I also learnt a lot more about trial procedures such as concurrent expert evidence (known as ‘hot-tubbing’) where experts give their evidence at the same time in a discussion chaired by the judge.
Overall, it was an enlightening experience which allowed me to learn about lots of new legal concepts, and I would highly recommend the experience to anyone interested in pursuing a legal career.