If you're searching for reviews about London law firm Summerfield Browne on Google and are lucky enough to find this post, consider if you want to work with a business that will attack people posting reviews about them. Can you really trust the reviews you might already have read, or are they just suppressing all the negativity?
If you look at the reviews from before this story broke, you would see that the answer is no, they are not suppressing all the negativity. They mostly had positive reviews, but there were a few that were quite negative.
This appears to be their website: https://www.summerfieldbrowne.com/
Looks like they might've done better to spend the effort making a website that looks like it was made in the last decade before attacking people for negative online reviews.
The guy shamelessly lied and called the law firm a "scam".
"Mr Bradshaw submitted that the gravity of the Defendant's libel is at least as serious as that in Monroe, and is comparable with that in Doyle. Accordingly, general damages award of £24,000 to £30,000 would be appropriate, subject to his concession that the claim was limited to £25,000.
In respect of special damages which were claimed at £300 per day, Mr Bradshaw submitted that on the basis of Ms Rhode's evidence there had been a significant reduction in enquires for a period of at least 6 weeks which would equate at £300 per day to a sum of £12,600.
In my judgment the claim for special damages is not made out. Ms Rhodes evidence is simply not directed to this point and no detailed financial or accounting evidence has been provided. Whilst I accept the Defendant has chosen not to appear and contest the figure the burden remains on the Claimant to prove its loss. I am however satisfied that reduction in the number of instructions was caused by the defamatory review and has caused the Claimant some financial loss. As Mr Justice Warby said in the case of Brett Wilson LLP v Persons unknown, responsible for the Operation and Publication of the website www.solicitorsfromhelluk.com [2015] EWHC 2628 [29] the loss of a single instruction can cost a firm tens of thousands of pounds (and in some instances more). In the circumstances I am satisfied that an award of general damages in the sum of £25,000 would adequately reflect the seriousness of the defamation, the financial loss which has occurred and the purpose of vindication."
That is not what liberal means. In fact the confusing setence in your previous comment has basically the opposite meaning than you meant: more liberal libel laws would be less strict.
I took "more liberal" to mean "more left" as in the political spectrum of Left vs Right, Liberal vs Conservative because that's the only definition that really fits the context of the sentence...
Despite the fact that Liberalism has much more to do with Liberty than liberal use of government, Liberals today certainly want to use the government liberally to make new laws for solving any small discomfort.
I don't claim to know as much about the difference between Republicans and Democrats as Americans themselves, but I find it very surprising to think that Democrats would oppose freedom of speech particularly more strongly - I'd actually presume it to be the other way round (maybe based on my own conflation of "liberal" in the US sense and in the original political sense).
With all that said, the way the original commenter referred to liberal as simply meaning "more ... use of law" is pretty hard for me to take seriously. Is apartheid more liberal than racial equality because it requires more laws? Come on. It comes off as an attempt to slander (ironically!) liberalism by claiming any bad law is liberal because liberalism uses laws.
Republicans/right/conservatives are the party of small government - hence the word conservative describing them. They favor free markets, which is to say: Don't make too many laws getting in the way of business!
The very meaning of the word Conservatism is "commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation." [3] Less change = less laws. The conservative right weren't the ones behind the Civil Rights movement in the US - that was the liberal left, creating more laws controlling things like school segregation and so forth.
So, I think you can see that "more (vs less) use of law" is absolutely one of the overarching themes at play in our political scene. Even as a complete layman who actively avoids politics I wasn't able to avoid this knowledge. I think you can confirm it with a few quick searches to get a feel for what kinds of things people have said about either party [4] [5] [6].
[0] https://www.americancommitment.org/content/democrats-repeal-...
[1] https://reason.com/2019/08/12/every-democrat-in-the-senate-s...
[2] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/cchr/law/legal-guidances-gender-id...
[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=define+conservatism
[4] https://www.google.com/search?q=democrats+against+freedom+of...
[5] https://www.google.com/search?q=democrats+want+to+control+ev...
[6] https://www.google.com/search?q=republicans+want+to+control+...
Yes, conservatives favour smaller government and fewer laws - actually that term means exactly that here in British politics too. But that doesn't mean any extra laws are necessarily liberal. Go back to my example of legislated racism to see that, which is clearly not liberal (in every sense of the word) despite requiring more laws and bigger government. Like the original comment I replied to, your comment and those sources come across a shallow attempt to insult Democrats by saying "look, this bad thing would require a law, and Democrats love laws, therefore they must want this bad thing!".
Maybe in this case my distance, as an outside observer, is actually helpful. I can see pretty clearly that Democrats wanting to limit freedom of speech is a rumour that doesn't reflect what Democrats actually want.
You're arguing with me because I made a comment that stemmed from my own perception of politics. Now that I've clearly explained the reasoning for my comment, you're contorting yourself to prove that my perception is wrong. In the face of empirical evidence you've given nothing more than your opinion.
> I can see pretty clearly that Democrats wanting to limit freedom of speech is a rumour that doesn't reflect what Democrats actually want.
They want to control speech. I've shown a law, one among many that they've enacted, which proved my point. In response to that you applied some strawman argument about it not being "freedom of speech" when nobody ever said that.
I don't think you're arguing in good faith, so I'm going to end this here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_liberalism_in_the_Unite...
Musk successfully used the hyperbole defense against the much more serious potential libel "pedo", though admittedly that was in US court.
More importantly, he called it a scam, and it isn't clear that that is a lie. He alleges that he paid for work, but they just rephrased the documents he gave them. Why wouldn't that be a scam?
> In the review, Mr Waymouth alleged: "I paid upfront for a legal assessment of my case.
> "But what I got was just the information I sent them, reworded and sent back to me."
Which sounds pretty scammy to me.
> The firm took legal action, stating that this was untrue and defamatory.
Seeing as he pulled the old "give me back my money and I'll delete that" it sure sounds like the typical leave a bad review for leverage strategy, his mistake was straight up lying.
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I got in a dispute with an apartment management over my deposit and left a review with dozens upon dozens of well documented missteps they had taken during my tenancy complete with pictures. I didn't lie and I didn't embellish...
20 minutes later I got a call that my deposit was being refunded in full and asking if I could kindly take down my review.
I hadn't lied in it so I never took it down, but I did condense it, removed the pictures and mentioned they had returned my deposit finally.
See Elon Musk calling a guy a "pedo" repeatedly with zero evidence, because he pissed him off online. Although there were other issues in that case.
The UK has way more strict libel laws than the US. If you lie about someone it's a LOT easier to get a civil judgment against you. Hency why a ton of magazines/newspapers have been successfully sued over libel whereas in the US this almost never happens.
If a business really wrongs someone, people tend to be willing to go into detail about how they were wronged. Especially since it sucks and if you're willing to write a review, you're probably also willing to make it one that informs others specifically what went wrong so they can avoid it.
Cavity wall and subsidence solicitors are rather less interesting.