Indefensible: A reckoning the legal profession cannot afford to skip – by Brian Rogers (UK)
I have just finished reading John Hyde’s new book Indefensible: How lawyers failed to stop the Post Office scandal. Hyde is deputy news editor at the Law Society Gazette, and for anyone who followed his live-blogging of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry hearings, the book will read as the fuller, more damning version of a story he has been telling in instalments for years. Published by Bristol University Press, it carries endorsements that should give every regulator, general counsel and compliance officer pause: Professor Richard Moorhead of Monash University and the University of Exeter calls it a book that gets to the heart of why lawyers are central to this scandal, and Ron Warmington of Second Sight Investigations Ltd praises its unflinching look at the conduct of the Post Office's in-house and external legal advisers.
I would urge every solicitor, barrister and compliance professional to do the same, in full, rather than rely on a summary — mine or anyone else's. The book has the pace of a screenplay and the evidential density of a tribunal bundle, and that combination is precisely what makes it dangerous to skim. What follows are some of the issues Hyde surfaces that struck me hardest from a regulatory perspective, organised around the professional obligations they engage. They are a sample, not an inventory — there is a great deal more in the book, and the cumulative effect of reading it in full is considerably worse than any list of bullet points can convey.
Why this book lands now
The timing matters. Sir Wyn Williams published Volume 1 of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry's final report on 8 July 2025, focused on the human impact of the scandal and on redress. As of his most recent progress update, on 8 July 2026, the volume dealing squarely with the conduct of lawyers had still not been published. Hyde's book is therefore not a retrospective gloss on settled findings; it is filling a live gap, drawing on the evidence given to the Inquiry to build a case against the profession before the statutory inquiry itself has formally reported on it.
The regulatory picture is moving in parallel. The Solicitors Regulation Authority has described its Post Office work as its largest ever investigation, with more than 20 live matters into solicitors and firms connected to the scandal. The SRA has said explicitly that it is waiting for the Inquiry's conclusions before moving to questions arising from the prosecutions and civil litigation of the 1990s and 2000s. Hyde's book does not wait.
The information vacuum around the boardroom
The pattern Hyde documents — lawyers who knew about miscarriages of justice but did not escalate them to the chief executive, general counsel and external advisers who failed to scrutinise the underlying material, advice on prosecution policy that was commissioned and then never passed up the chain — describes a collapse of the most basic function a general counsel exists to perform: ensuring the person accountable for the organisation is not operating blind. Where Hyde's account goes further, and more uncomfortably, is in suggesting that in at least some instances the chief executive was actively misled rather than simply under-informed. If that is right, it is not a supervision failure. It is a conduct failure that sits squarely within SRA Principle 2 (integrity) and, depending on the facts a tribunal eventually finds, potentially far more serious territory.
Privilege as a shield, not a sword
Hyde's account of lawyers using privilege improperly and suppressing matters to keep them out of the public domain deserves particular scrutiny: legal professional privilege was never designed to protect evidence of iniquity, and the iniquity exception exists precisely to stop privilege being weaponised to bury material a prosecutor's disclosure obligations required to be revealed. If lawyers knew that key prosecution witnesses had credibility problems, or that Horizon's evidential reliability was in genuine doubt, and used privilege to keep that from surfacing rather than confronting whether the exception applied, that is not a grey area of professional judgement. It is a direct breach of the duty to uphold the rule of law and the proper administration of justice — SRA Principle 1 — dressed up in the language of confidentiality.
The prosecutor who forgot they were a prosecutor
One of the more structurally important points in the book, echoed in Hyde's public interviews around publication, is that the Post Office prosecuted sub-postmasters as a private prosecutor, rather than through the Crown Prosecution Service. That status does not relax a prosecutor's duties — the common law obligation to act as a "minister of justice," and the disclosure obligations under the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996, apply regardless of who is doing the prosecuting. Hyde's says that convictions were known to be unsafe, that key witness issues were known and not disclosed, and that these concerns were treated without urgency, describes exactly the kind of failure that regime was designed to prevent. The absence of an independent charging decision — the kind of check the CPS Code for Crown Prosecutors imposes internally — appears, on Hyde's account, to have removed the one structural safeguard that might otherwise have caught this earlier. Lawyers acting as gatekeepers of the law is not a slogan; it is the entire justification for self-regulation, and Hyde's book is, in effect, a 275-page argument that the gate was left open.
Independence that existed on paper only
The recurring theme that in-house lawyers were too closely aligned with the business, and lacked the independence the role requires, is where Hyde's book connects most directly to questions I have been raising about compliance and governance roles more generally. Advising the Post Office on how to discourage sub-postmasters from seeking their own legal advice, drafting a sub-postmaster contract that Hyde characterises as unfair, and approving policies that treated postmasters as guilty until proven innocent, are not the actions of lawyers exercising independent professional judgement in the interests of justice. They are the actions of an internal and external legal function operating as an extension of a commercial strategy.
How lawyers treated the people in front of them
Hyde does not let this remain abstract. The book's account of lawyers approaching lay sub-postmasters as adversaries rather than as unrepresented individuals facing life-changing allegations — an inequality of arms the profession's own advisers apparently recognised and did nothing about — and of bullying or intimidatory conduct, is where the book stops being a governance case study and becomes, frankly, difficult reading. Sending congratulatory emails when convictions were secured, in cases we now know rested on unreliable evidence, is the detail that will stay with most readers longest. It is a small, human detail, and it is precisely because it is small that it is so damning: it shows people who had, by that point, stopped asking themselves whether they were doing the right thing at all.
An unshakeable faith in the computer
Hyde has spoken about one of the aspects of his research that struck him most: lawyers, on the strength of a single day's training, developed an unquestioning assumption that the Horizon system was reliable, an assumption several were still operating under long after doubts had been raised elsewhere in the organisation. A lack of curiosity is not, on its own, a disciplinary matter. But a lawyer's core professional skill is scepticism — testing evidence rather than accepting it — and Hyde's account suggests that scepticism was suspended precisely where it mattered most.
What this means for the profession now
None of this is only a story about the Post Office. It is a case study in what happens when every one of the ordinary checks a legal system relies on — independent in-house counsel, a prosecutor's disclosure duty, the limits of privilege, basic professional curiosity — fails at the same time, in the same organisation, over the same two decades. Hyde's book does not have to wait for Sir Wyn's report, and that is its real contribution: it puts the evidence in front of the profession now, while the regulatory and disciplinary process is still working through it.
Buy it on Amazon (approx NZD 40), read the whole thing, and do not stop at the sections that confirm what you already believe about this scandal.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are the writer’s own and nothing in this post should be relied upon as a substitute for professional legal or regulatory advice.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Two of John Hyde’s articles have previously been re-published with permission on this blogsite:
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