From Asda to Harrods: the law firm that has City giants running scared

Martyn Day looked out his window and saw tanks staring back at him. It was 2006 and the co-founder of the law firm Leigh Day had travelled to the Ivory Coast as part of a legal battle against the commodity trading giant Trafigura, which had been accused of dumping toxic waste off the coast of the West African country.
But when the Yorkshire-bred lawyer checked into his hotel in the city of Abidjan, the first Ivorian civil war was raging and tanks were literally parked on the lawn outside his room.
“I felt a bit iffy,” said Day nonchalantly. “I spent the first night thinking ‘God what have I got myself into?’.”
It was just one memorable moment in a lively career. Day’s firm has become the bête noire of multinational companies. Volkswagen, Shell and British Airways have all had to pay out settlements running into the millions of pounds after doing battle with Leigh Day.
The latest target in its sights is Harrods. The firm is among those representing women who allege being sexually abused by the department store’s former owner, Mohamed Al Fayed. Leigh Day is currently representing one woman but said that it had been contacted by 70 more with similar experiences.
Richard Meeran is leading the case for Leigh Day: “This should be properly viewed as an extreme example of sex trafficking because it involved a system within the Harrods organisation and elsewhere which enabled this abuse by the ultimate perpetrator, Al Fayed, and without that assistance and co-operation, it wouldn’t have been possible.”
The row has also spreading across other parts of Al Fayed’s empire as last week fresh allegations emerged relating to his tenure as chairman of Fulham FC. Meeran is calling for a public inquiry, “there are a lot of parts to this organisational structure that facilitated this abuse,” he said.
Michael Ward, Managing Director of Harrods, said he was “appalled” by the allegations and Al Fayed “operated [Harrods] as his own personal fiefdom”. He added: “The Harrods of today is unrecognisable to Harrods under his ownership. As detailed new information has come to light over the past 18 months, the business has established a settlement process, designed in consultation with independent external experts in personal injury litigation. We encourage former colleagues to contact us using this process so that we can provide the support, and recourse, they need.”
As one of the few remaining traditional partnerships — rather than a limited liability partnership, as most law firms are these days — Leigh Day is under no obligation to post its accounts to Companies House.
But the scale of its fees can be seen in some of its victories. Leigh Day, which now has 263 lawyers, runs most of its cases on a “no win, no fee” basis, which allows it to charge the losing party if it manages to get payouts for its claimants. In the Trafigura case, which saw Leigh Day win about £30 million for its 30,000 claimants, the firm attempted to charge £105 million in fees to the Singaporean trading giant. It is unclear exactly how much Leigh Day ended up netting from its Trafigura work, but a source close to the firm said it fell short of the £105 million mark.
While its high-profile battles rake in the biggest fees, Leigh Day’s less smaller cases keep the lights on year round. The firm is split into five divisions: human rights abuses, personal injury claims, medical negligence, employment and international claims.
Its personal injuries practice represents cyclists who have been knocked off their bikes, for example. These cases take less time to prosecute and are more likely to pay out. If a claimant wins £10,000, then Leigh Day may collect a fifth as a fee. These end up subsidising the bigger international cases, which are less likely to pay out and cost millions to prosecute.
“That’s the importance of doing different types of work, some of which bring in money much more steadily and consistently and other work, which is riskier, but potentially more profitable,” said Meeran.
It is the sort of work that has historically been derided as “ambulance chasing”. Indeed, two paralegals were suspended from the firm in 2017 for allegedly posting flyers near to Grenfell Tower, offering their services to survivors of the fire that engulfed the tower block. At the time, the firm said it had no knowledge of the flyers, and the paralegals said they were working independently from the firm.
Meeran objects to the “ambulance-chasing” label: “The objectives [of our cases] are to obtain legal redress for clients for whom access to justice would not otherwise be possible and, also, importantly, to serve as a deterrent against future wrongdoing.”
It is also in the middle of an equal pay battle against some of the UK’s biggest retailers, such as Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons, which could pay out hundreds of millions to claimants.
The upfront costs of a case can be onerous, however, even with cash from its smaller victories. So Leigh Day turns to another source for external funding: specialist hedge funds.
These hedge funds, known as litigation funds, invest large sums into law firms and then take a chunk, usually 25 per cent, of the firm’s winnings. Pogust Goodhead, another firm that pursues international human rights cases, is entirely fundedby litigation funders. The investment manager Gramercy, chaired by the economist Mohamed El Erian, has a large litigation fund division that is footing the bill for Pogust Goodhead’s class action against the miner BHP over the 2015 Samarco mining disaster in Brazil.
One area where Leigh Day is understood to use such external funding is its equal pay fight against some of the UK’s biggest retailers. The disputes centre on the fact that retailers have paid their predominantly male warehouse staff more than their mostly female shop floor staff. Leigh Day argues that this is an infringement of the Equal Pay Act 2010, but retailers argue that the different pay levels reflect the vast differences between the two roles. Warehouse work is antisocial and physically demanding, and so requires a higher wage to attract staff.
Last month a tribunal sided with 3,500 Next employees, most of them women, which opened up the retailer to a possible £30 million of back payments. Lord (Simon) Wolfson, Next’s chief executive, warned that off the back of the ruling, the retailer may have to close some stores.
“Anything that’s done to increase costs, whether that’s wages or rents or rates, all the things that push up costs are likely to have an impact on the viability of some of the stores,” he said. Wolfson added, “This is certainly not a threat. We are pointing out the reality of store openings and closures. It is about the costs of the business going up relative to sales.”
But Day dismissed the warnings. “The expert evidence is pretty strong to say that these jobs were of equal value [to the company] and indeed the women should have actually been paid more [than they were].” Day argued that customer interaction on the shop floor, for example, can generate significant value to a business which should be compensated.
Day began his career at the firm that would become Clifford Chance, one of London’s prestigious five ‘magic circle’ law firms that advise on corporate deals. “Within five minutes. I knew it wasn’t for me,” he said. He met Sarah Leigh while working at the firm Bindman & Partners and the pair struck out to form a personal injury firm in 1987 (Leigh retired in 2002).
Its first high-profile criminal negligence case came in 1990, when it was drafted in by Greenpeace to advise on a case against leakage from the nuclear site at Sellafield. Part of the case revolved around children who had developed leukaemia, allegedly because of exposure to radiation. It was about this time that Richard Meeran decided to leave his corporate law job and join Leigh Day. “When I joined, there were fewer than ten of us,” he said. The firm now has a total of 839 staff, 263 qualified lawyers.
The Sellafield case attracted significant media attention, something that is key to the firm today. It was among the firms that took part in the BBC’s Panorama documentary on the allegations against Al Fayed this month.
In the following decades it would win compensation for Kenyans who had been jailed and persecuted during the Mau Mau rebellion; Nigerian villagers who had seen their rivers polluted by Shell; and those affected by the Windrush scandal, when some first-generation immigrants struggled to prove they had the right to continue to live in the UK.
It also represented hundreds of Iraqis who had been mistreated while in the custody of British troops. However, its handling of some of these cases led to the firm being reprimanded, and Day being hauled in front of the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.
The firm had acted on behalf of nine Iraqi soldiers who claimed the British Army had murdered detainees during a battle. The Al-Sweady inquiry into the deaths found that while abuse of prisoners had occurred, the worst of the allegations were fabricated. Day was cleared of the charges in 2017.
“I accept that the evidence in the end was nothing like as strong as we thought it’d be when we were doing it,” Day said.
Day is personally dealing with the firm’s equal pay disputes, with dates for the tribunals involving Asda and the Co-op set to be announced over the coming months.
“We feel pretty bullish that we’re likely to win,” he said. The 67-year-old appears to be in no mood to retire any time soon.
“A lot of people are perfectly good lawyers who just enjoy going in nine to five and a very stable life. That’s totally fine, but it’s not for me,” he said.