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> "Also it was apparent that the Defendant made no attempt to engage in the Claimant's dispute resolution process. A complaint should always be the first stage in resolving any issues of customer satisfaction."

What bullshit legal reasoning. If you don't wait on hold on some company's help line for them to probably tell you to pound sand, that can be used against you in court?

It can be used against you in Court if you were to make a statement that the company is a "scam solicitor".

Maybe an analogy to sales would make this more understandable: If I was selling computers and the laptop I sold you had some serious issues, you cannot immediately turn around and call me a scammer. Because it might not be true, actually there is a more likely explanation that I didn't know about the issues with the laptop.

Now if you would talk to me instead and I would insist that there couldn't possibly be an issue with the laptop and charge you for the faulty product, you _might_ call me a scammer. (Maybe one single instance of this wouldn't even be enough. Maybe you would even need to prove that I did in fact know about the problem with the laptop)

On the other hand you can definitely leave a review saying that you received a bad product. You would not be required to talk to the company to be able to do that.

Edit: To further elaborate a bit because I think people in this thread are having some weird reactions to this ruling: It's pretty normal that you cannot go around and tell lies that hurt somebody's business. If you think about it this is very normal. I cannot stand in front of a bakery with a sign that says "The bread in this bakery contains dangerous amounts of lead" if that is not in fact true. And if nobody buys bread anymore because of my sign, I will be liable for the damages incurred.

This is less clear if my sign says: "In my opinion the bread in this bakery tastes funny." Because this is an opinion rather than a fact.

But in the case at hand we are talking about somebody calling a company a "scam solicitor". That's mostly a factual statement, you could prove that the company is either doing regular business or that they are scamming people. If the defendant is not able to prove that they are in fact a scam business, it's very reasonable to assume that he is liable. The concrete damages incurred are however debatable in my opinion.

I don't think that laptop analogy works. If someone (re)sells a faulty laptop then they may indeed not realise that laptop has a problem - you could argue they should have tested it better, but at worst they've been negligent. But the product in this case was a document written by the lawyers; they can't claim they didn't know what was in it, because they wrote it! If it really did just contain the background notes supplied by the buyer, without any extra research or substantive legal opinion, then it sounds to me that it really did con him out of that money.

Yeah, I also don’t understand some of the responses here. An analogy would be that someone has a problem with some software they are using, so they do a bit of research and find a possible answer on Stack Overflow, and they hire a software developer to help them implement a fix. The software developer bills them £200 and provides detailed instructions on fixing it.

The individual leaves a review for the software developer saying “I paid upfront for help with my software. But what I got was just the Stack Overflow information I sent them, reworded and sent back to me. Another scam developer.”

If the developer uses the site the review was left on to obtain business and they can demonstrate a specific monetary loss after the review was posted, they have claims for damages. A non-trivial portion of a software developer’s job is looking stuff up on Stack Overflow, so applying that knowledge using their experience isn’t scammy at all.

Details of the legal advice provided are missing, but the same could be true. Client sends contract and seeks advice on what their obligations are upon contract termination, and the law firm responds by rewording the portion of the contract which spells out their obligations. If they find the obligations to be obvious, then maybe they didn’t need legal advice in the first place. If they don’t understand the quoted obligations, they should follow up asking for clarification. But saying “another scam solicitor” is libelous.

And isn’t his offer to remove the review in exchange for a refund considered extortion?

In fairness, yes, you DO have to give the company a chance to address your complaint first.

If a doctor would amputate my arm by mistake I would leave them a bad review no matter the apologies or compensation I get from them.

Over the top example but I think it drives the point. People don't want to experience bad service.

In most cases, going through some companies dispute process will work 99.99% of the time. That is my experience buying from a lot of online shops (directly and via ebay) that they will in a grand majority of cases respond reasonably quickly and refund you or swap the item. That isn't true for every transaction and for every shop.

But most of the time a bad interaction can be resolved via the help line or a dispute process.

But even if that fails doesn't make the shop a scam. It makes them a bad shop. You can say so in your review since "bad shop" is a subjective opinion and not a statement of fact. "scam" is not only an objective fact but also something illegal so it's going to require some evidence to back that up.

And yes, that can be used against you in court. If the defendant had gone through the dispute process, it is more likely the court would have atleast partially sided with them, if they showed up in court (which they also didn't) and claimed to have been emotionally distraught or similar when writing that review over the cost or process of whatever happened.

This is the difference between freedom of speech as it is in the US and freedom of opinion more commonly deployed in Europe. Statements of fact require you to have some kind of proof. The level of proof will differ depending on what it's about, but insinuating that someone is a scammer will require you to show that to be fact.

If there's no evidence to support their claims / the claims are false... I get that.

>Defendant made no attempt to engage in the Claimant's dispute resolution process.

That worries me. I have to contact the organization and jump through their hoops before I leave a poor review?

Hopefully that's not the only standard here and just some additional information added to the rest.

Not before you leave a poor review but before you accuse them of being a scammer. They didn't sue for the poor review, they sued for defamation. There's an important difference there.

I feel like that's a critical detail that's missing from the headline. He didn't just say "these guys are a bunch of jerkbags and you shouldn't do business with them" he said "this company is operating a scam." That's not an opinion, it's a specific accusation like saying "I went in and they beat me with a pipe."

Would it be a scam if you paid for work X, but were given work Y which should cost much less than work X and is useless to you?

If I paid a mechanic to put on new tires, but he just rotated my tires instead and said that he had fulfilled his side of the deal - is that not a scam?

I think this an interesting collision between common use of language and legal use of language. I think it's reasonable for the solicitors here to say that they were accused of running an illegal fraudulent operation affecting multiple people. I also think it's reasonable for the defendant to say that he was personally scammed. If you read the judgement it appears the law sides with the first interpretation so if you're going to accuse a business of running a scam, you better first make sure there are other victims besides yourself.

This is kind of a surprise to me and why I thought it was worth bringing up. Wouldn't it be nice if this issue was clarified in the BBC article perhaps with some helpful advice about how to deal with poor service or indeed genuine scammers while avoiding being accused of libel.

The judgment alleges that indicating that you believe a company to be a scam - insofar as providing an unsatisfactory service for payment could be considered a scam - is on par with accusing someone of urinating on war memorials.

It even says that couching the statement in an opinion "To me it was a scam" wouldn't be sufficient to avoid this. Would it all have been saved if he'd said "It was like a scam"?

It also says that the claimaint's belief that "after a single review went up, we saw a drop in inquiries" (para) is sufficient for £25,000 of damages! That has to be considered outrageous, surely?

Fundamentally, this is just the legal system defending its own reputation by using its monopoly on law.

Basically corruption.