A SCOTTISH solicitor and her former firm have been cleared of wrongdoing after a case against them went all the way to the UK Supreme Court.
BTO Solicitors partner Jane Steel and her former firm Bell & Scott had been accused of acting negligently when dealing with the 2006 sale of a property on behalf of her client Headway Caledonian.
Headway had bought the property in Hamilton’s Cadzow Business Park nine years earlier using a loan from mortgage business NRAM, which at that time was part of Northern Rock bank.
NRAM claimed that it made a loss of £370,000 due to an error Ms Steel made when emailing it on the eve of the 2006 sale. NRAM did not take separate legal advice in relation to the sale.
In agreeing with the original ruling made in the Outer House of the Court of Session, Supreme Court judge Lord Wilson said that as Ms Steel was Headway’s lawyer she did not have a duty of care to NRAM, even if it did go on to suffer economic loss because of her “careless misrepresentation”.
“We should accept that a commercial lender about to implement an agreement with its borrower […] does not act reasonably if it proceeds upon no more than a description of its terms put forward by or on behalf of the borrower,” Lord Wilson’s leading judgment said.
Ms Steel left Bell & Scott for BTO in 2009. While Bell & Scott’s partners and staff transferred to Anderson Strathern in 2011, the firm, which had significant debts, continued to exist until it was wound up in 2016. It did not trade during that time.
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