Brenda takes the road to presumption

This year’s SLN Annual Review profiles PI lawyer and motorcycle expert Brenda Mitchell who established the UK’s first legal practice devoted to helping her fellow motorcyclists.

Brenda began her career in personal injury law at Allan McDougall Solicitors before moving on to Thompsons Solicitors and then Digby Brown.

But she never lost her abiding passion in motorbikes: “My passion and interest was always motorcycling and cycling. I’ve been riding motorcycles since 1980 and that was always my great love. I did give up the bikes when I had a family, I’ve got two kids, both grown-up now. But when they were young I thought ‘well it is a bit risky’. They’re both pretty tidy on motorcycles themselves. About eight years ago I went back to riding. I’ve got a Honda CBR-600 which I love.”

She established Digby Brown’s motorcycle department but ultimately eschewed the process-driven approach in favour of the type of individual-first service that she formed with Thompsons’ Syd Smith.

“I very much wanted it to be a personal service. Clients are not processes or file numbers – they are individuals. I keep in touch with a lot of clients. The motorcyclists in particular go through life-changing events and need a solicitor from day one to stand by them, to get them the ability to let them make choices about their future careers so that they can perhaps alter them to suit their disability. That’s why I tour around Scotland, I need to go to them. You will never get a claims pack from me, you will never be asked to complete a questionnaire. That, to me, is just a disaster for the type of clients I deal with.”

Brenda is also a key figure in the campaign for presumed liability and sits on the cross-party cycling group of the Scottish Parliament.

She explains that “It is very much an education process at the moment – there is a lack of understanding. If we’re ever going to get a Members’ Bill we have to go through that education process in the first instance.”

Brenda is emphatic: “There is no doubt that if you want to have safe levels of active travel you need some form of presumed liability. There isn’t a single country with safe levels of active travel that doesn’t have it.”

She and her colleagues believe “destructive disparity” should become the guiding principle in law.

“In any collision, when there’s been an injury and you’re making a claim for the compensation, it is up to the individual to prove, on a balance of probabilities, that the driver was at fault. What we’re saying is that if you look at destructive disparity why not simply reverse the burden of proof so that the driver’s insurance company should compensate that injured cyclist unless they can prove that the cyclist was at fault,” she says.

Read the Scottish Legal News Annual Review 2017 here.