Sam Phillips succeeds in High Court with alternative approach to Extended Civil Restraint Orders

12th April 2017
Sam appeared recently in the High Court (QB) on a landlord’s application to strike out a claim and obtain an Extended Civil Restraint Order (‘ECRO’)  in a claim made against it and 21 other defendants.
Mr Justice Nicol accepted the landlord’s submissions that the Claimant’s claim (premised on the European Convention on Human Rights, among other things) disclosed no reasonable grounds for bringing the claim and was totally without merit.
Existing case law has established that in order for an ECRO to be made (as opposed to a Limited Civil Restraint Order), the Court must be satisfied that 3 claims have been brought that are totally without merit. Sam argued on behalf of the Landlord that the individual elements of the Claimant’s claim against all 21 other Defendants were sufficiently diffuse to each amount to claims that were totally without merit in their own right.
Judgment (acceding to all of the Landlord’s applications) was handed down on 23 March 2017.
Richards v IPT and 19 others [2017] EWHC 560 (QB).