Trusting a Benchful of Bishops: Law v. The Chartered Institute of Patent Agents

(originally published in the CIPA Journal, April 2007)

As the Clementi reforms take effect, CIPA’s representative and disciplinary functions will at last be separated. This evolution may at first seem minor; the vast majority of CIPA members pass through their professional lives without ever incurring disciplinary action or the threat of it. For the few less fortunate, however, this reform resolves the long-standing dilemma of how the Institute can reconcile its roles of both supporting its members and sanctioning them when things go wrong.

A dusty 88-year-old law report,[1] recording one of the darker moments of the Institute’s history, highlights the problems arising where representational and disciplinary functions are combined. Involving breaches of natural justice, a week-long trial and judical criticism of the Institute’s conduct, it is clearly a tale from a bygone age.

Britain at War

The story has its roots in the First World War and Britain’s efforts to combat the U-boat menace.

To many in 1914, the submarine was little more than a nautical curiosity of questionable usefulness. The sinkings of HMSS Pathfinder, Aboukir, Cressy and Houge in the early months of the war, however

soon demonstrated that advances in technology had transformed the submarine into an importantweapon of war. The British with their overwhelming sea power had established a naval blockade of Germany early in the war. For Germany, the only possible way to impose a blockade on Britain was through the U-boat. Hence, on 4 February 1915, the Kaiser declared the seas around the British Isles a war zone. Effective 18 February, Allied ships in the area would be sunk without warning. Some effort was to be made, however, to avoid sinking clearly neutral vessels.

Despite  this,  first  in  April 1915  the  Harpalyce, a

British cargo vessel flying the white flag and  picking up food relief for Belgium, was sunk. Soon thereafter, on 7 May, the  passenger liner Lusitania was torpedoed off of the coast of Ireland with a loss of 1,198 lives, including 128 Americans and almost 100 children. Against this background of escalating losses at sea, it is no surprise that the British War Office and private inventors were busy drawing up schemes for inventions to trace, track and destroy the U-boats before they struck.

Patents, Fuses and Secrets

Such was the state of affairs when Martin Hale called upon John Law, a patent agent in his early forties practicing on his own account from an office on the Strand. Martin Hale was a serial inventor who had previously been in communication with the Submarine Attack Committee of the Admiralty about other inventions. During these communications, the committee had sent Mr. Hale a sketch of a hydrostatic bomb fuse which the Admiralty considered to be the invention of two Admiralty officers. On Mr Hale’s behalf, John Law prepared and filed a patent application for a new design of aerial bomb for attacking submarines. Mr Law then wrote on Mr Hale’s behalf to the Admiralty, notifying them of the patent application and highlighting its potential usefulness in the war effort.

In reply, the Admiralty noted that a fuse described in the specification corresponded to that previously communicated to Mr Hale and demanded that all reference to the fuse should be deleted and that no

further publication of it should be made without express authorisation. The description of the offending fuse was thereupon deleted as requested.

The matter might have ended there but for a patent application subsequently filed by Jacob Longman, a technical assistant in John Law’s office. Born in 1888, Mr Longman had come to England as a child and was educated at the City of London School, where he displayed outstanding ability in mathematics, science and modern languages. He won an open exhibition to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, graduating with honours in Natural Sciences in 1910. After a short period working as research chemist, Jacob Longman entered the patent profession and began to train as a technical assistant in John Law’s office. With the outbreak

of the war, and as his foreign nationality precluded  him from military service, Mr Longman had volunteered to undertake chemical research for the British government.

It was the combination of Jacob Longman’s linguistic skills and his background as a patent attorney that enabled him to provide the Admiralty with a new design for an anchored submarine attack mine. The inspiration arose from an unlikely source, namely a recently published German patent that Longman had slipped from Switzerland into England. Together, Jacob Longman and John Law prepared a description and illustrative sketches of the anchored attack mine covered in the German patent and sent these to the Board of Invention and Research of the Admiralty. These illustrative sketches included reference to a version of the fuse which had originally been included in Martin Hale’s specification (Longman had been present at a meeting between Hale and Law where the fuse had been discussed), modified to demonstrate how the Admiralty’s fuse might be adapted for use in the new attack mine.

The Board of Trade Investigation

Neither Jacob Longman nor John Law ever considered that there was any secret about the fuse. The Admiralty did not, however, agree. In December 1915, the Admiralty wrote requesting that all references to the fuse be deleted from Jacob Longman’s specification. Subsequently, in April 1916, the Admiralty wrote to the Chartered Institute requesting that the matter be referred to its Disciplinary Committee, alleging a grave breach of trust.

CIPA’s Disciplinary Committee drew up a statement of charges and sent it to the Board of Trade, requesting the appointment of a committee to consider the allegations and whether John Law should be struck off from the register of patent agents.[2] A committee consisting of the Comptroller General of Patents and a former Comptroller was duly instituted and sat for an inquiry in January 1917. Throughout the inquiry, the Institute supported the application to strike off John Law.

A decision was finally issued in April that year to the effect that John Law had been guilty of “disgraceful professional conduct” in that he had “permitted his assistant to utilise a fuse which to his knowledge his assistant had become acquainted with only in a professional capacity and which had been imparted to him privately by a client of his one Martin Hale.” The committee stated that unless a letter of apology was sent to the Lords of the Admiralty within 14 days, they would recommend to the President of the Board of Trade that John Law’s name should be erased from the register.

John Law was unwilling to give any such apology, but in spite of this the President of the Board of Trade departed from the recommendation of the committee and held that although Mr Law’s conduct “fell short of the standard of honour expected from members of his profession”, the circumstances of the case did not require him to find Mr Law guilty of disgraceful professional conduct which would lead to the removal of his name from the register.

A Special Meeting of Council

Any relief that John Law felt must have been short-lived, however. Having been thwarted in its efforts to remove Mr Law from the register through a Board of Trade Inquiry, CIPA’s council resolved instead to expel him from the Institute using the Institute’s own internal procedures.[3] A special meeting of Council was arranged for 20 December 1917.

The meeting rapidly degenerated. As soon as it opened, John Law objected that all the Council members who had taken part in the Board of Trade proceedings should recuse themselves from participation in the present discussions. CIPA’s president objected that this would require the entire Council to recuse itself, which it was unwilling to do. Of the fourteen council members attending, only one, Mr Ransford, volunteered to sit but not vote. With this matter unresolved, John Law left the meeting and Council ruled in his absence that he should be expelled from the Institute.

The Court Trial

Within days, John Law secured an interim injunction to prevent Council’s ruling from being brought into effect. The case came to a full trial before Mr Justice Eve in March 1919. By this time John Law was represented by a powerhouse legal team which included Frederic Maugham KC and Fairfax Luxmoore, a future Lord Chancellor[4] and a future Lord Justice of Appeal, respectively. The fundamental issue at trial was whether Council’s involvement in the Board of Trade Inquiry precluded it from sitting in judgment in the later proceedings.

Judgment was delivered on 4 April. In it, Eve J. ruled that Council’s expulsion of John Law was invalid and ultra vires as its role as accuser in the earlier proceedings prevented it from ruling on the matter later on. Eve J.’s judgment was highly critical of both the Institute and the Board of Trade inquiry.

Commenting on the zeal with which CIPA had prosecuted Mr Law, the Judge stated that: “I confess I am quite unable to understand the attitude of an association, formed for the protection of the honour of a profession, which so far from assisting its members to repel an attack (which after all may be an unjust one) allows itself and its resources to be used to conduct the attack and if possible secure a conviction. ”[5]

The judge’s most scathing comments were, however, reserved for the Board of Trade Inquiry. After having noted that none of the inquiry committee members had any legal or judicial qualifications, the judge remarked: “The committee conducts its investigations in private; it has no power to compel the attendance of witnesses or insist upon the production of documents;  it cannot administer an oath, and has apparently no rules of procedure to guide it; it communicates no findings or decision to the parties;  it makes a report to the Board which is conclusive as to the facts, but of which no copy is furnished to accuser or accused; and on this report the Board exercises the powers conferred upon it by rule 17, and there is no appeal. A late Lord Justice – one of great learning and wide experience – Lord Justice Farwell – once stated that he could not trust the whole bench of bishops to do justice under such conditions. With a respect for the episcopate as profound as that of the Lord Justice I entirely adopt his language.”[6]

The only person receiving any credit from the affair seems to be John Law. Although, the scope of the trial did not extend to a review of the Board of Trade decision and hence the trial could not formally exonerate him, the law report does record the judge’s understated view that: “evidence has been aduced before me for the first time which experienced counsel… for the Institute… has frankly admitted … probably would have materially altered the attitude of his clients at that inquiry had it been then produced.” The judge went on to say: “I cannot help thinking that Mr Hale’s evidence put a different complexion on the whole matter… I think it goes very much … towards removing all cause of complaint against the plaintiff.”[7]

Postscript

John Law remained a member of the Chartered Institute for another 28 years, retiring in 1947. After the war, Jacob Longman continued in chemical research for a number of years before returning to the patent profession. He became a fellow of the Chartered Institute in 1929 and remained a member of the Institute until his death in 1966.

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