Uk Law Gazette
A litigant in person in a divorce case has been penalised with £10,000 costs for directing ’threatening’ emails to his wife’s solicitor’s trainee.
Deputy District Judge Mark Harrop said it was a ‘particularly disturbing’ aspect of proceedings that the husband in KA v LE repeatedly targeted the most junior lawyer for communications.
The judge said that the husband wrote to the court about his ‘positive interactions’ with the trainee and on numerous occasions proposed to her that the two of them meet to discuss the case or just ‘chew the fat’.
‘A party’s lawyers cannot avoid communications from the other party just because their contents might be unsavoury,’ said Harrop. ‘Deliberately sending all his emails only to the most junior, female, member of the wife’s team, even when she was on holiday, suggesting private meetings and asking her not to share his messages with her employer, strikes me as an egregious abuse of the obvious power imbalance between them; one which I can only imagine made her deeply uncomfortable.’
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