Glanville Davies affair

The Glanville Davies affair was a scandal in the English legal profession which resulted in greater reform of the regulatory processes for solicitors and was one of the justifications for the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990. Glanville Davies was a well-respected solicitor and a member of the Council of the Law Society of England and Wales who massively overcharged his client, Leslie Persons, sending him a bill for £197,000 that was reduced on taxation to £67,000. Davies was not punished by the Law Society's internal regulatory committees, which allowed him to resign from the council on the grounds of ill-health with his reputation intact. Following litigation and public criticism, the Law Society commissioned an internal report that found "administrative failures, wrong decisions, mistakes, errors of judgement, failures in communication and insensitivity".^[1] A private member's bill reformed the way in which the Law Society investigated disciplinary complaints, although not to the extent initially proposed, and paved the way for the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990 that created an independent disciplinary body.