Adrian Davies - Legal Career

Legal Career

After a year spent as a trainee at Ernst & Young, Davies qualified and practised litigation for six years as a solicitor at Slaughter and May. His specialist area was property litigation in which field he was known as a tenacious and enthusiastic litigator. Davies later retrained as a barrister and was called to the bar in 1998. He now practises at 3 Dr Johnson's Buildings. His specialist areas include recoveries; real property, mortgages, landlord & tenant; wills, probate and trusts; civil actions against the Police, Customs & Excise et al.; and slander and libel.

He unsuccessfully represented the controversial British Holocaust denier David Irving at the Court of Appeal in 2001 after Irving had failed in a libel action against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. Irving had represented himself at the trial before Mr Justice Gray.

In a landmark family law case in 2006 he successfully represented Mrs Lillian Day in a dispute with her son over the beneficial ownership of a family home.

Probably Davies's best publicised client was the former Big Brother contestant Lisa Jeynes, who unsuccessfully sought up to £150,000 from the News of the World in 2007. Ms Jeynes contended that an article in the newspaper in 2003 had implied she was a transsexual. Mr Justice Eady in the High Court in London ruled that no reasonable reader would have drawn that inference from the newspaper's words, and therefore threw out Ms Jeynes' case.

Another of Davies's best known clients was the Pakistani-born Manchester businessman Shami Ahmed.

In August 2007, Davies unsuccessfully represented two members of the British National Party in an appeal against a libel judgement given at first instance in favour of Searchlight magazine. The court ruled that the so-called 'Reynolds defence' applied, which meant that Davies was prevented from arguing the claimants' case against the alleged defamation on the merits. Roberts v. Gable is regarded as a leading case on the reportage defence.

During 2008 Davies successfully represented Shaun Brady, former general secretary of the rail union ASLEF, and Steven Trumm (a fellow union activist) in libel actions against Brady's successor as ASLEF leader Keith Norman.

He represented Simon Sheppard, who was the first person in the UK to be convicted of inciting racial hatred on the internet, and in January 2010 succeeded in convincing the Court of Appeal to reduce Sheppard's sentence.