I am very much saddened to report that my friend, @nearlylegal.co.uk passed away this weekend.

nearlylegal.co.uk/2026/04/gile...

Not only in his specialist realm of housing law, but he wrote with righteousness, thoroughness and clarity about some unprincipled conduct in some other areas of law and of commentary on the law

I’m so very sorry to read this. I never knew Giles face to face but quite often exchanged posts and messages with him on Twitter and read his blogs. I admired his uprightness and clarity of thought very much, and enjoyed his photography. Sincere condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues

Very, very occasionally. Still post on Twitter where there’s more variety and volume of engagement, despite its many flaws and disagreeable features (no shortage of those here, either, but nice to see a familiar name or two all the same)

And having made a regulatory complaint, why not wait for it to be determined by the Bar Standards Board before publishing any commentary on it which gives rise to what appears to be at least a pleadable claim in defamation?

Why didn’t the GLP support the complainant with skilled legal advice in seeking a civil injunction and/or pressing for a criminal prosecution for harassment? Either or both (if successfully pursued and proved) would have been a more effective remedy than a complaint to a professional regulator

As for the “institutional power“ of the GLP, as an organisation it is active in litigation, and in this instance it lent its support to a complaint to a professional regulator, even commissioning external legal advice in connection with this. Those are both pretty unusual steps in such complaints

The GLP also employs a specialist defamation solicitor. It isn’t public knowledge whether his advice to Maugham is covered by his salary or whether he is charging a client fee. Even if he is, his fee is likely to be much lower than that charged by a conventional solicitors’ firm run for profit.

The Good Law Project has c £4M on its balance sheet. Sarah Phillimore’s crowdfunder has raised about 1% of that figure. Jolyon Maugham is a KC in London, she is a junior barrister in Bristol, and a private individual, not founder and chief executive of a not for profit institution supporting her

it is worth reading the full unredacted determination, of which there is a copy published on Sarah’s substack. And considering the strength or weakness of a defence of truth to her defamation claim in the light of the BSB’s rejection of the complaint of harassment bsky.app/profile/sara...

Someone who believes they are a victim of harassment has strong primary remedies in civil and criminal law under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. Pursing a professional regulatory complaint with the institutional power of a KC led organisation seems more like punching down than anything else

The Bar Standards Board sent the GLP a detailed determination rejecting the complaint of harassment on 27 March 2026. Yet it has taken the GLP almost a week to update its followers on this outcome, and to do so with redaction of examples of the complainant’s own abusive language cited by the BSB

Good article. It’s very much not to the credit of the WASPI campaign that it did not focus on women in genuine hardship or from the world you describe but pursued a relentless and undeserving maximalism in its aspirations

He became significantly more sweary over the last year or so, perhaps because of stressful personal circumstances. Apart from that, he was an entirely inoffensive Twitter mutual who I assumed to be genuine in everything he posted. But I considerably doubt that now, knowing what I now know about him

Same word, both things, context usually will make it easy to tell them apart

He had many Twitter mutuals in the English legal world and cultivated the impression of belonging very successfully

He wasn’t even eligible to apply to take the Bar Transfer Test, let alone Calle himself a barrister “ex temp”, as he wasn’t an NL advocaat, and the transfer test, like temporary call, is a route for qualified lawyers only

I’m quite surprised by that as to the extent criminal cases are publicly reported the defendant’s name appears to be often anonymise, even when found guilty and sentenced

One random consequence of becoming immersed in this story is that I remembered the Anglo Dutch Young Bar Exchange of 1994, and my house guest then, who I kept in touch with for some years afterwards. I looked her up and was pleased to see she is now a judge in the court of appeal in Amsterdam

No, but they do, and they publish all the rules for progression and accreditation from one level to another. If RoF had dug deeper on this point I think all they might have found was the student membership from 2022

I now know that in NL “advocaat” and “mr” (master of laws) are both protected titles, with criminal penalties for their misuse. Unqualified representatives may act as advocates in cases in local courts with a value up to €25,000 but aren’t otherwise chartered or regulated as a profession

And I knew he wasn’t on the barristers’ register with a practising certificate or have an English chambers address. I didn’t actively think about his barrister status at all, but probably assumed he had been called to the Bar and kept up a social connection but wasn’t registered to practise

I think I looked at it in his pre-CILEX days. The only evidence of his membership is that he appears to have joined as a student in 2022 from an image he posted to social media then. That is a very long way in both time and hurdles to jump from being a CILEX authorised practitioner

Yes, this seems to have been just about status and forming friendships within an otherwise closed world to him. There’s an economic ceiling on what he can earn from his legitimate work as an unqualified representative in NL, including judicial assessment of legal costs, just as in this jurisdiction

This particular example is neither here nor there, but the real harm people like him cause is to take the time, attention, trust, and goodwill of established practitioners away from other newcomers who have acquired their credentials honestly through their own hard work and merits

Here’s an example of that. A couple of friendly tweets procure him a branded tote bag from a set of barristers’ chambers, with the word “barristers” prominent on it. And it even accompanies him when he happens to photobomb a video someone has made for tourists about his home town in the Netherlands

Once you see it, you can’t unsee the way in which he carefully ingratiated himself with English barristers and other people in the legal world on Twitter, and acquired and displayed props for his rather anachronistic English barrister fantasy. But at the time it seemed entirely innocuous

I wasn’t ever going to be collaborating with him in any legal work or even recommending him as a Dutch lawyer to my professional clients. That would have called for proper due diligence. But not an early evening social drink with others and a friendly Anglophile who appears to be in the legal world

Of course, everyone would do that if encountering him in a professional working context. But in a professional social or online para-social setting it’s very easy for a plausible, ingratiating person like him to be taken on trust as something rather different from what he actually is

That’s the thing. There wasn’t. He was perfectly plausible. I met him once in London for a drink with some other legal Twitter people. He didn’t give us any reason to check his credentials. I merely assumed he was a Dutch lawyer with professional connections and clients in England