Skorupski's Law

The Association of University Teachers (AUT) and their abominable solicitors

The behaviour of the AUT and their solicitors in relation to my case was—and continues to be years later—contemptible. In August 2009 I discovered that the AUT's "solicitor" Carol Fox was not qualified at the time she was giving legal advice to the AUT's Legal Aid Committee about my case. At that time (2003) the AUT were repeatedly referring to Ms Fox's summary of the case and recommendations—as what "our solicitors" say... It was a sham. In 2003 Ms Fox was a paralegal; she did not qualify as a solicitor until 2005.

In 2002 I went to the AUT, saying that my position at the University of St Andrews was intolerable. They referred me to their solicitors—Thompsons of Edinburgh—where I spoke with a senior partner, David Stevenson. Mr Stevenson gave me what would later turn out to be a fatal piece of advice—that there was no problem in my resigning with three months' notice so that I could see out my duties as examinations officer for my department. While morally this appeared to me to be the most acceptable course of action so as not to damage students or cause undue stress to my colleagues, in law it undermined my claim for constructive unfair dismissal from the outset. One of the planks of constructive dismissal is that the employee must not "affirm the contract" by staying too long and accepting a salary. This may seem grotesquely inappropriate in certain professions—should a surgeon walk out on his patients with no notice?—but it's the law.

As a senior partner in a specialist employment law firm, Mr Stevenson must have known that this was the law and should have advised me accordingly. But he didn't, and I lost—in spite of overwhelming evidence of pathological behaviour at the University of St Andrews (as members of the University's own executive pointed out in a damning internal report). Unfortunately I did not become aware of the problem of affirming the contract until the case was well under way—and of course I did my best to argue that it was an irresponsible absurdity in certain circumstances. But I lost...

My preparation of the case with Mr Stevenson lasted about seven months. Then one day, quite out of the blue, I got a letter from someone else at Thompsons, Carol Fox. Ms Fox stated, on paper headed Thompsons Solicitors & Solicitor Advocates: "I wish to inform you that I have now been asked to take responsibility for your case in preparation for the forthcoming Tribunal Hearings... In the meantime I am undertaking a full review of all the case papers in relation to your claim against the University of St Andrews... Yours sincerely, Carol Fox, Thompsons". I was rather alarmed by this development, not least because Mr Stevenson had not had the professional courtesy to inform me of the change of legal representation or the reasons for it. However, I subsequently had a meeting with Ms Fox. She identified herself as "an employment solicitor with a lot of experience". At the time I had no reason to doubt her.

Ms Fox then went on to write a legal opinion on my case for the AUT's Legal Aid Committee. It was riddled with mistakes, the most elementary of which was that she failed to understand the reason for my resignation. I wrote a long and strongly-worded letter to the AUT protesting about her incompetent review and recommendations. It was to no avail: the AUT decided to accept Ms Fox's legal opinion anyway and refused to fund my case. It was a great deal cheaper for them and it was more convenient to sacrifice a union member than to fight such a high-profile employer with plentiful resources and very highly-placed contacts, not to mention being the university of the future king.

In August 2009 I was informed of Ms Fox's non-solicitor status back in 2003. I wrote to Mr David Bleiman, the AUT's man in Edinburgh who had dealt with my case and was still in the same post. I asked him why the AUT had represented Ms Fox to me as a solicitor when she was not. He declined to answer my email but forwarded it to the union's National Head of Legal Services and Employment Law, Mr Michael Scott. Why? It was a simple enough question. What was Mr Bleiman afraid of? Mr Scott wrote to me saying that the union—now renamed as the University and College Union (UCU)—was denying my claim until I could produce documentary evidence. I replied saying that part of the documentary evidence was private correspondence between my lawyers and me and should not be sent to him. I asked him another simple question: if the AUT was not representing Ms Fox as a solicitor, how were they representing her? Mr Scott simply didn't answer. I asked him again and again he didn't answer. I wrote to Mr Bleiman and asked him the same question. He didn't answer either. I decided to tell the story on my website...

for more on the duplicity of the AUT and Thompsons click here...

The author

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Skorupski's Law: "The more vain one's ambition, the more redundant one's grasp of morality"