‘The solicitors for the postmasters approached our clerk in 2015, for counsel for a group action. “Lots of cases are time-barred; we can’t go behind the convictions; the contracts are written so we can’t win; there is little hard evidence; the allegations we need to make are very serious; there is no money, so we need help to get funding.” “That’ll be our Mr Green!” was the reply.’

So began the legal action brought by Alan Bates and 554 others against the Post Office, culminating in a stunning High Court victory in December 2019 dramatised in the TV mini-series Mr Bates vs The Post Office. I am sitting with Patrick Green KC in his team’s ‘war room’ in Henderson Chambers. Not many barristers get to be portrayed sympathetically in a TV drama. ‘I met “my” actor, Adam James, in this room. He introduced himself by saying to me “Hi, I’m you!”

‘I’d been fantastically unsuccessful, by conventional measures, for a long time at the Bar. But this allowed me to do pro bono work, cases others wouldn’t touch and to fall in love with my job. When we started the Post Office action we got together in this room and I said: “We will be completely outresourced. The case will be very long and very hard. I will never ever criticise you or be reproachful. I know you will always be doing your best. We will all make mistakes. If someone – me included – says something that you think is wrong, always say so.” There were two big trials, back-to-back. The Post Office fielded two teams, one for each trial. The Post Office tried to strike out all our witness evidence, before the first trial, which backfired. During the second trial, they gave disclosure late at night. I said, “They think we won’t read it!” We were working 18-20 hours a day for weeks on end. We were really close as a team, always arriving in court together, upbeat at all times.’

The settlement on the successful conclusion of the High Court case was for £58 million, of which only about £12 million went to the group; solicitors’ and counsel’s fees were about £14/15 million. The remainder was largely taken up with the cost of litigation funding, from Therium ‘who were really supportive’, and insurance ‘against the Post Office’s crazy costs’. The settlement also required the Post Office to cancel judgments and set up the Historical Shortfall Scheme for postmasters outside the group.

‘Later, the government decided to offer our clients similar compensation. We carved out of the settlement the wrongful conviction claims, and we required the Post Office to go through every prosecution conviction with an independent barrister, including for people who hadn’t joined the group.’

Green was not involved in the later criminal appeals, in which the Court of Appeal declared any convictions which relied on Horizon evidence unsafe. Did he favour legislation to overturn all Horizon convictions? ‘As an exception, yes – unless they can all be examined speedily in the courts. Parliament would be going with the grain of what the courts have said.’

Throughout this time Green was taking appeal after appeal in a quest to obtain compensation for the inventor, Professor Ian Shanks, against Unilever. Shanks had invented the capillary fill diabetes testing device in 1982 when working for Unilever. ‘I was originally instructed in 2006. Nobody had ever won an ‘employee inventor’ action under s 40 of the Patents Act 1977. I took it on as a challenge. We lost in the Patent Office after a nine-day hearing. We lost even worse in the High Court and were refused permission to appeal to the Court of Appeal on the papers. We renewed the application orally and were ‘just’ granted permission by Floyd LJ. Then we lost in the Court of Appeal but went on to win five-nil in the Supreme Court.’ Shanks was awarded £2 million compensation. This was only two months before the victory in the Post Office case. Quite a spell for Green, who in 2020 was voted The Lawyer’s Barrister of the Year.

Green grew up ‘in the middle of nowhere in the Fens. My father and uncle had started a farm. They were self-reliant, innovative, good to their employees and hugely risk-taking, and they built a big business out of nothing. I worked on the farm and in the building department, laying concrete. It was an outdoor life, warm and loving. My father would remind us about the responsibilities that came from being fortunate. When I won an exhibition to Haileybury, he congratulated me but reminded me I was “lucky”. That was a bit annoying!

‘At school we received a visit from two officers from the Royal Marines. Their bravery and teamwork in the recent Falklands War massively appealed to me. I determined to apply for a short service limited commission between school and university. For 18 months, I ran 40 miles a week to get fit. It was all absurdly competitive, but I got in. On one endurance course I helped one of the other candidates, with a push up a steep hill. I had checked to see no one was watching, but they saw and gave me feedback on it when I passed the course. In the Marines, I spent three months, mostly in a snow hole, on the NATO Arctic Deployment. The Marines boosted my resilience and optimism. Nothing has ever been harder, physically or mentally, than what I did in that year. The lessons – about leadership, being gracious under pressure, trying to inspire people in difficult times, attending to team morale – I hope stayed with me.

‘In the week before summer leave, I smashed my knee up. It looked like a disaster at the time but it gave me a couple of weeks to retake my A level maths.’ Still in ‘Marine mode’, he did several weeks’ revision in a few days. ‘I upgraded my C to an A. This got me into Magdalene College, Cambridge, to study law. Law was a fresh start. I liked debating at school; I hated bullying and abuse of power, especially against people who had no way of securing justice.’ He tells me a story of how when aged 13 he stood up against an injustice at school. ‘I packed my bags. I couldn’t stay in a school if that happened. Eventually my housemaster relented. After A levels, he commented to my parents, “He was always his own man!” I thought that was a huge compliment.’

In College he was warned by his director of studies, Christopher Greenwood (later Sir Christopher) that he was in danger of failing his first year criminal paper. Greenwood made him come to his home for extra tuition during the Easter vacation, which did the trick. ‘Years later someone came through on the telephone to ask me to lecture as a visiting fellow at the LSE. I recognised the voice as his and said, “I bet this was a call you never thought you’d make.” He replied, “On the contrary, why do you think I put in all that effort?”’ Green lectured there for seven years.

At College he was elected President of the Junior Common Room. ‘This was the year when female students were first admitted, and I encountered the joys of having to put the press right on its reporting. I hadn’t thought of running for President until the porters collared me and said, “Have you seen who else is running? You’ve got to run!”’ Apparently, the others were too opinionated, ‘whereas I believed that there was room for everybody’.

Why the Bar? ‘All the people at Magdalene who were lawyers were barristers and I had not particularly enjoyed the work experience I had done in a solicitors’ office. My year was the first year of a new Bar course, where there were serious teething troubles. We students “unionised”. We had a meeting about it with Lennie Hoffman [then a Chancery judge]. I tried for pupillage and, after a few rejections, started putting the letters into an album to show how I ended up doing something else. But then I was offered a place here in Chambers. There were three pupils competing, as we thought, for one place. One of us – who was older and female – was getting all the family work. I went nearly a month without being on my feet and was told to go and watch her and learn. I went to see her and she handed me some photocopying to do for her. My father had always told my brother and me that we had to serve: “Get used to doing it well, and with grace.” So I asked her, “How many copies?” In the end we all got tenancies.’

Advice to those starting out? ‘Focus on what will really matter in your case. Listen to your client and what they feel strongly about, which often matters more than you may think. Be voracious in acquiring skills, when the opportunity cost of learning is so much less. Learn about negotiation and mediation; it will improve you as a lawyer and in your life. Do pro bono work. Paraphrasing Lincoln: lawyers have a superior opportunity of doing good. You need to understand how that feels. If you fill your life with purpose, you don’t feel the same need for financial rewards and status.’ He speaks with deep experience, as some of his cases have been financially precarious for him and his family.

As to the future: ‘I feel really lucky to have ended up doing such an extraordinary range of work, from commercial and civil fraud to investment treaty arbitration, defamation, planning, competition, JR [judicial review] and employment. I love defending people’s rights, trying to uphold good governance and the rule of law, nudging the court of public opinion and trying to improve how things work. I enjoy being an ambassador for the profession. It is a primary duty of government to uphold the rule of law and ensure people can secure their rights. Given that we don’t have a proper legal aid system, the role of litigation funders is essential. In my experience, funders have always behaved well. We could not have done the Post Office case without Therium. In fact they funded it well beyond the point when they should have stopped economically. I think, as barristers, we are really lucky to have the chance to do such an interesting job. Maybe my father was right!’ 

Adam James as Patrick Green in ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office.