Law Society Gazette
Nationwide tributes have been paid to the solicitor and campaigner for access to justice Lord Phillips of Sudbury (Andrew Phillips OBE) who died on Sunday at the age of 84. Phillips (pictured above), admitted in 1964, founded London firm Bates Wells & Braithwaite and went on to set up the Legal Action Group and the Solicitors Pro Bono Group.
He was nationally known as a broadcaster, appearing as the ‘Legal Eagle’ on Jimmy Young’s BBC Radio 2 show for nearly 30 years. Phillips became a Liberal Democrat peer in 1998.
In a statement today, Bates Wells & Braithwaite said that Phillips died peacefully after a short illness, with his family at his side.
‘Andrew founded Bates Wells in 1970 and fought tirelessly to use the law as a force for good with both clients and within the greater legal sector, founding the Legal Action group in 1971 and setting up the Solicitors Pro Bono Group in 1996. Andrew never shied away from saying that a legal system that only served the interests of the wealthiest sections of society was no legal system at all and was adamant that Bates Wells would be different. His first trainee recruitment advert “We do not seek to maximise profits. We realise there is a life to live outside the office. We seek to serve the public interest as well as our own” mirrors the values and culture of the firm today.
‘After his retirement in 1998, Andrew joined the House of Lords where he continued to campaign for the third sector and was one of six peers on the joint pre-legislative scrutiny committee of the bill that was later passed as the Charities Act 2006.’
After his retirement from the Lords, Phillips served as chancellor of the University of Essex between 2003 and 2013. The university’s current vice chancellor, Professor Anthony Forster, said: ‘The University of Essex community is deeply saddened to learn of the death of our fourth chancellor, Lord Phillips. Lord Phillips made a significant contribution to the development of the university and served with distinction and enthusiasm, despite his many other commitments.’
Reflecting on the 50th anniversary of the Legal Action Group last year, Phillips spoke of ‘a profound crisis in the provision of law services to poorer people’.
‘We won the war through common purpose, through a world where if you were poor you were offering to lay down your life as if you were money-rich. Values and sentiments came out of that war. “We’re all in this together.” Does anyone say that now? But we were all in it together. In the field of battle, the officer was offering no more than the private – namely his or her life. And that sense of commonality, community, of common good, motivated so much of what happened in the aftermath of the war.’
