Today’s Chambers Chatter moves back to 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square, where associate member barrister Wendy Miller operates after representing both Cummins and Cepac against Lee Thompson. Wendy can leave the “serial litigant” vocabulary on the desk for this one. One of her chambers colleagues has already written something considerably more useful: an article explaining how he thinks the civil justice system should clamp down on vexatious litigants.
His name is Alexander Bunzl. He is a commercial and chancery barrister, public-access practitioner, experienced in obtaining strike-outs and dealing with civil restraint orders and, according to his current chambers biography, a man who spends some of his time away from practice lecturing about history aboard cruise ships.
Excellent.
Nothing settles the stomach before a voyage through costs sanctions, mental health, £100 million lawsuits and emotionally distressed pets quite like discovering that your guide also knows his way around a buffet deck.
Welcome aboard.
Alexander Bunzl Writes The Manual
In January 2023, Alexander Bunzl published an article in the Law Society Gazette carrying a title that did not waste much time stroking its chin.
How to clamp down on vexatious litigants.
No mist. No poetry. No “some thoughts on procedural reform”. Straight through the fucking saloon doors.
Bunzl begins with a claimant who, he says, had brought more than 30 separate actions against multiple parties. Each claim sat just below £10,000, which Bunzl describes as the “magic number” because of the costs consequences associated with the small-claims track.
According to his account, the claimant believed that dividing the litigation into numerous claims would allow several bites at the apple while providing protection against adverse costs. The courts did not agree. Strike-outs followed, including findings that claims had no merit, and Bunzl’s client eventually obtained a general civil restraint order.
That should have been the point where the ship returned to harbour.
It wasn’t.
The existing claims remained alive. Costs had been ordered but, according to Bunzl, had not been paid. His public-body client continued spending money resisting proceedings, court time continued disappearing down the plughole and the claimant remained able to continue with cases already issued.
That, Bunzl argued, was an injustice.
Then he got out the toolkit.
Thirty Claims And A Bigger Hammer
Bunzl proposed several reforms. First, he wanted clearer warnings that splitting related litigation into multiple sub-£10,000 claims would not necessarily provide insulation from costs. Fair enough. Courts are not vending machines where somebody can keep feeding in identical coins until a different judge dispenses a chocolate bar.
More significantly, he proposed an automatic review where somebody launches something approaching 30 claims in a short period. Further claims, he suggested, should generally stop until the first batch has been heard, subject to limitation concerns.
Then comes the heavier kit.
Once a claimant has an unpaid costs order against them, Bunzl suggested their other claims should be paused until that order is paid. He also argued that a general civil restraint order ought to bite harder against proceedings already issued.
The instinct is easy to understand. Litigation can become abusive. Defendants can be dragged through repetitive claims. Public money can be pissed away answering the same propositions under slightly different claim numbers. Courts already drowning in work do not magically acquire another Tuesday because somebody has discovered the N1 form.
Indeed, the current Civil Procedure Rules provide limited, extended and general civil restraint orders where parties repeatedly issue applications or claims found to be totally without merit.
So Bunzl was not inventing the concept.
He wanted more teeth.
Poor Mental Health Appears In Paragraph Two
Buried among the procedural hardware is the sentence that makes the article especially interesting to TCAP.
While proposing automatic review of prolific litigation, Bunzl writes that claimants should not be permitted to litigate “so recklessly” and adds that people with poor mental health are especially vulnerable under the status quo.
That sentence deserves more attention than the easy jokes.
He is not saying poor mental health makes somebody vexatious. Quite the reverse: his stated concern is that the existing system may allow vulnerable people to keep issuing proceedings that ultimately expose them to damaging consequences.
There is a serious argument underneath it. Someone who is distressed, obsessive, frightened, unrepresented or psychologically unwell can make terrible litigation decisions. A system that simply accepts another fee and stamps another form may not be doing that person a kindness.
But then comes the institutional solution, and this is where TCAP’s ears prick up.
Review them.
Pause them.
Restrain them.
Make costs bite before other claims proceed.
The language moves very quickly from vulnerability to control.
Nobody needs to accuse Bunzl of cruelty to notice the pattern. The legal system is forever discovering human distress and then reaching for a fucking gate.
Access To Justice, Terms And Conditions Apply
The difficult question is where genuine persistence ends and abusive litigation begins.
That boundary matters because institutions rarely describe themselves as obstructing access to justice. They describe themselves as protecting resources, preventing abuse, managing proportionality, enforcing finality, preserving court time or dealing with unreasonable conduct.
Sometimes that is exactly what they are doing.
Sometimes the person on the receiving end has simply become inconvenient.
The danger lies in pretending those two situations are always easy to distinguish.
One litigant may bring 30 ridiculous claims because he cannot accept that a dispute is over. Another may bring several proceedings because several legally distinct wrongs actually occurred. A claimant may repeatedly lose because their cases are hopeless, because they cannot plead them properly, because they cannot afford representation, because their health has gone to shit, or because they are simply wrong.
Those things can look remarkably similar from a distance.
Once somebody acquires the adjective vexatious, however, the noun “litigant” starts doing less work.
The label walks into court before they do.
Meanwhile, Alexander Bunzl Accepts Direct Instructions
Here is where the chambers biography adds a lovely extra layer.
Alexander Bunzl is public access qualified.
According to 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square, he accepts instructions directly from litigants as well as solicitors.
There is no contradiction in that. Public access exists precisely so members of the public can instruct barristers directly, while barristers are equally entitled to identify abusive litigation when they encounter it.
Still, the juxtaposition is magnificent.
INSTRUCT ALEXANDER, says the chambers website.
Come directly. No solicitor required.
Bring your commercial dispute, your property problem, your insolvency issue, your complicated litigation. Apparently, clients value his responsiveness and he usually completes work within 48 hours.
Very efficient.
Just try not to bring thirty of the bastards.
The door is open, but somebody is counting how many times you walk through it.
The £100 Million Iceberg
Bunzl’s article then leaves the shallow end entirely.
In separate proceedings, he says, somebody sued his client for £100 million.
Even Bunzl says he had never seen a case of that size, nor had many colleagues. The figure created a practical problem for counsel because Bar Mutual, the professional indemnity insurer, would not provide sufficient cover.
Suddenly the abstract discussion about vexatious litigation becomes a professional-risk calculation.
Do you increase your insurance for several years because one litigant has typed an enormous number into a claim form? If you are the sole breadwinner, do you touch the case at all? Can a sufficiently gigantic claim make lawyers back away regardless of its actual prospects?
Bunzl asks whether very high-value claims might therefore be used to intimidate defendants and make representation harder to obtain.
That is a legitimately interesting point.
A claim does not become more meritorious because somebody adds zeros. Yet once enough zeros appear, insurers start coughing, professionals reach for calculators and everyone suddenly discovers urgent reasons to be elsewhere.
The £100 million may be bullshit.
The insurance exposure is real.
Civil litigation is beautiful like that.
Then The Pets Arrive
At this point the voyage could have returned to the dock.
Instead, the pets turn up.
Bunzl says the £100 million litigant was prepared to pay £10,000 to issue proceedings in the High Court. Her Article 6 right to a fair trial meant the claim still had to be considered, even though some of the claimed losses struck him as bizarre.
Among them was £25,000 for emotional damage caused to her pets.
That is the sort of detail a writer thanks whatever god controls legal journalism for delivering.
Forget the hundred million. Forget professional indemnity. Forget general civil restraint orders.
Somewhere in the bundle, apparently, the animals had their own emotional-damage line item.
We do not know whether the pets had retained counsel.
Perhaps the cat was leading junior.
The important part is what Bunzl does with the anecdote. His article closes with the hope that the law might eventually limit vexatious litigants to “one bizarre case at a time.”
And there is our title.
Thank you, counsel.
No notes.
One Bizarre Case At A Time
It is a very good line.
It is also doing some fairly serious work.
Behind the joke sits a proposed philosophy of court access: if somebody has demonstrated a sufficiently poor litigation history, the system should ration their ability to keep using it.
That sounds attractive when the example involves thirty nearly identical claims and unpaid costs.
It becomes harder around the edges.
How many claims make somebody prolific? How much overlap is too much? What happens when the underlying disputes genuinely differ? Should an unpaid costs order in one matter effectively lock the doors to justice in another? What if the person cannot pay rather than will not pay?
Bunzl’s article is an argument, not legislation, and it openly invites reform. That distinction matters.
Still, the direction of travel is clear.
One person.
One strange case.
Please wait until the ride has stopped before boarding another.
Welcome Aboard The SS Civil Procedure
Then there is Bunzl’s other occupation.
Outside practice, according to 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square, he lectures on cruises about history.
That is almost too perfect.
By day, civil restraint orders.
By evening, Byzantium near the piano bar.
There must be moments somewhere off Madeira when a passenger approaches after a lecture on the Congress of Vienna and says, “Sorry, Alexander, while I have you, can I ask about a boundary dispute?”
Run.
Do not look back.
Still, the cruise detail provides a useful image for Bunzl’s argument. Civil litigation really can resemble a badly managed liner. Too many passengers, insufficient staff, people fighting over deckchairs, a vast bill accumulating below decks and somebody insisting their grievance requires an immediate audience with the captain.
Bunzl’s answer is not to sink the ship.
It is to control boarding.
The question, as always, is who gets left on the quay.
Wendy Miller, Serial Litigants And A Familiar Vocabulary
This is where 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square becomes interesting again.
Barrister Wendy Miller currently appears on the chambers roster as an associate member. TCAP knows Miller through separate litigation involving Cummins and Cepac, including proceedings in which the language around repeat or “serial” litigation has already featured heavily.
She has nothing to do with Bunzl’s article.
The connection is the professional address and the vocabulary.
That is enough to make TCAP smile.
You can enter 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square through Wendy Miller and, after wandering around for a while, find a colleague who has literally published How to clamp down on vexatious litigants.
It is the sort of coincidence that makes a website feel algorithmically curated.
We came looking for Wendy.
The building handed us a restraint order.
The Strange Economics Of Being Difficult
The Bunzl article is strongest when it exposes the economics underneath litigation.
Courts speak the language of rights, justice, evidence and due process, but litigation also runs on invoices.
Every hearing costs somebody something. Every letter consumes time. Every application drags clerks, solicitors, barristers, judges and administrative staff into another round. When a public body is involved, the taxpayer eventually finds the tab under the door.
A vexatious litigant can weaponise those economics because the process itself becomes punishment.
But defendants can weaponise economics too.
So can corporations.
So can the state.
A wealthy party can drown an opponent in disclosure, interlocutory applications, expert evidence and costs exposure until the right to bring a claim begins to resemble the right to walk naked through a hedge.
That is why “stop abusive litigation” is easy to applaud in principle and bloody dangerous when converted into broad cultural instinct.
Every procedural weapon eventually discovers somebody it was not originally designed for.
The Restraint Order Is Not A Fly Swatter
Current civil procedure already recognises that reality by imposing thresholds.
Civil restraint orders are not supposed to appear because a judge finds somebody irritating.
The rules tie them to claims or applications found to be totally without merit, with escalating forms of restraint depending on persistence and circumstances.
A general civil restraint order is serious machinery. It can prevent a person from issuing claims or making applications in specified courts without first obtaining judicial permission.
That is not a slap on the wrist.
It is a locked door with a judge holding the key.
There are cases where that is plainly necessary. Courts cannot function if one person is permitted endlessly to recreate the same dead dispute under fresh headings.
Nevertheless, once the machinery exists, scrutiny matters.
Especially when the people caught by it may also be unrepresented, distressed, mentally unwell or simply catastrophically bad at law.
Justice has to distinguish persistence from abuse without becoming annoyed that it has been asked to bother.
That is the bastard of a problem.
Thirty Claims Can Be Thirty Claims
There is another deliciously mundane lesson in Bunzl’s article.
Numbers look guilty.
Thirty claims sounds insane.
£100 million sounds insane.
£25,000 for emotional damage to pets sounds like the bundle has started drinking.
Those reactions are understandable, but courts still have to do the boring bit afterwards.
What is the cause of action?
What happened?
What evidence exists?
Is this the same dispute being repeatedly recycled?
Has the claim already been determined?
Is the pleaded loss legally recoverable?
Is the application totally without merit?
The number at the top of the form does not answer any of those questions.
Neither does the number of forms.
Sometimes quantity is evidence of obsession.
Sometimes a bastard has simply had a very busy year.
The Chambers Profile Makes The Joke Better
Bunzl’s current 4-5 biography proudly records that he has obtained strike-outs with findings of no merit for vexatious claims and advised a chief commissioner who obtained a civil restraint order.
So the Gazette article was not a random intellectual excursion.
This is part of his actual practice.
He knows this corner of litigation from inside the room.
That makes the piece worth reading seriously even when TCAP is taking the piss out of the cruise schedule.
There is expertise behind it.
But expertise does not exempt an idea from examination. In fact, the more plausible a reform sounds, the more closely its edges deserve inspection.
“Stop nuisance litigation” will always be popular with people currently being sued.
The harder question is what happens when tomorrow’s nuisance turns out to be right.
History, as Alexander Bunzl presumably tells cruise passengers, contains a few examples.
One Case At A Time, Please
So where does that leave us?
Alexander Bunzl has a respectable commercial and chancery practice, direct-access credentials, experience dealing with genuinely vexatious litigation and a published argument that the system needs stronger ways to stop prolific claimants burning through court time and other people’s money.
He also recognises that poor mental health can leave litigants particularly vulnerable under the current system.
That tension is the interesting bit.
Protection can become restriction with astonishing speed.
Concern can become control.
A mechanism designed to save someone from reckless litigation can also become the mechanism that tells them they may no longer litigate without permission.
There is no tidy answer hiding under the table.
Just judges, costs, rights, forms, human behaviour and an endless argument about who gets through the door.
Meanwhile, somewhere on a cruise ship, Alexander Bunzl may be explaining the fall of an empire to a room full of pensioners while the buffet quietly closes behind them.
Back at 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square, the chambers website invites members of the public to instruct him directly.
Wendy Miller remains down the digital corridor.
And TCAP, having once again ignored the sensible advice to stop clicking, has discovered a barrister who wants the courts to ensure that certain litigants enjoy their chaos in carefully controlled portions.
One bizarre case at a time.
Please form an orderly queue.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project