The David Greene Story: A Legal Battle Against the Law Society’s Former President

Why this matters

Professional discipline cases are not only about individual lawyers. They affect public confidence in the legal system, the perceived independence of regulation, and the practical ability of lay complainants to pursue serious allegations against well-resourced or prominent practitioners.

David Davies’ dispute with David Greene, a solicitor later associated with senior Law Society office, is presented as one such case. Davies says the dispute began as a costs and retainer issue after litigation involving EcoPower.co.uk Ltd, Transport for London and the Public Carriage Office. It later became a professional-conduct dispute about what was said to courts and disciplinary bodies.

The public-interest question is not whether Davies is right on every point. It is whether the evidence, decisions and tribunal reasoning can be explained in a way that maintains confidence that professional standards are applied consistently, especially where the complainant is a litigant in person or lay applicant.

The case spine

The supplied chronology says Edwin Coe LLP, represented by David Greene, was retained by EcoPower.co.uk Ltd in 2008 to pursue judicial review proceedings concerning taxi emissions technology. Davies says the later dispute turned on whether Greene and the firm continued to act for EcoPower, or whether there was a break followed by a separate personal retainer with Davies.

That distinction mattered because Edwin Coe later sought payment from Davies personally. Davies maintained that EcoPower, not he personally, was the client. He also disputed the suggestion that there had been a long period with no relevant contact.

Davies places weight on a 2015 HMCTS letter which, according to his account, confirmed that Greene and Edwin Coe were recorded as representing EcoPower continuously from April 2008 to May 2010. That document would need to be reviewed before any stronger publication wording is used.

The disciplinary route

Davies’ account is that his complaints to the SRA did not produce the investigation he considered necessary. He then pursued a lay application to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. The supplied chronology says the complaint was initially struck out as an abuse of process, but that Davies later succeeded on appeal in the Divisional Court.

The chronology further records that Greene appealed, but that the Court of Appeal dismissed that appeal, allowing the disciplinary complaint to proceed to a substantive hearing. The later SDT hearing is said to have accepted that certain statements were inaccurate, but to have rejected dishonesty or sanction on the basis that the inaccuracies were inadvertent.

The importance of the case lies in that sequence. It is unusual for a lay complainant to keep a professional-discipline complaint alive through multiple appellate stages. It is also unusual for the same dispute to generate such sharply different views about whether the record disclosed an arguable case.

Inaccuracy, mistake or dishonesty?

The core legal and regulatory distinction is narrow but important. A statement can be wrong without being dishonest. A professional can misremember events, misunderstand documents, or express something inaccurately without intending to mislead. But in litigation and disciplinary contexts, inaccurate statements can still matter where they affect the court, the client, the opposing party or the regulator.

Davies’ position is that the documentary trail made Greene’s account impossible to reconcile with the true chronology. The countervailing position, as recorded in the supplied account, is that the later tribunal and court outcomes treated the inaccuracies as inadvertent rather than dishonest.

Publication discipline matters here. It is safer to say that Davies alleges a serious inconsistency between the evidence and the later record than to assert dishonesty as fact without the full tribunal reasons, court judgments and underlying documents.

The consistency question

The supplied draft compares the Greene outcome with other professional-discipline cases involving inaccurate statements. That comparison may be important, but it is legally sensitive. Professional sanction depends on the precise facts, the allegation pleaded, the tribunal’s findings, the mental element, mitigation, public protection and the applicable professional rules at the time.

The stronger public-interest point is therefore not that two outcomes are automatically irreconcilable. It is that disciplinary bodies should explain clearly why inaccurate statements produce sanction in one context but not in another. Public confidence depends on intelligible distinctions.

That framing preserves the force of the concern while reducing publication risk. It asks for coherent regulatory explanation rather than asserting an unproven motive.

The conflict-of-interest question

Davies also raises concerns about apparent conflicts of interest and institutional proximity. The supplied draft refers to alleged links between decision-makers and the Law Society or the wider legal establishment. These allegations require particular care.

There is a legitimate public-interest issue where disciplinary or appeal bodies are asked to determine complaints against prominent legal figures. Apparent independence matters. But the test for publication is evidential, not rhetorical. It is necessary to identify the role, connection, timing, decision-making relevance, disclosure position, and whether any rule or guidance was engaged.

Without that structure, a conflict allegation can become too broad to withstand scrutiny. With it, the article can ask a legitimate accountability question: were the safeguards strong enough, and were the reasons transparent enough?

The accountability test

The case is strongest as a test of institutional accountability rather than as a declaration that one party’s entire account is correct. A publishable Legal Lens treatment should focus on what can be evidenced, what has been decided, what remains disputed, and what the public can fairly ask of the professional regulatory system.

This is the discipline that gives a difficult article force. It avoids a one-sided campaign document and instead presents a framework for examining whether the system dealt properly with an uncomfortable complaint.