Communications with SRA

The request was refused by Ministry of Justice.

Dear Ministry of Justice,

could you please disclose all e-mails that have been sent to or received from the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) concerning the firm Leigh Day since 1 January 2015?

Yours faithfully,

John Roberts

Central Correspondence Team, Ministry of Justice

1 Attachment

Dear Mr Roberts

 

Please find attached response to your FOI request

 

Kind regards

Ministry of Justice

 

 

This e-mail (and any attachment) is intended only for the attention of
the addressee(s). Its unauthorised use, disclosure, storage or copying
is not permitted. If you are not the intended recipient, please destroy
all
copies and inform the sender by return e-mail.

Internet e-mail is not a secure medium. Any reply to this message
could be intercepted and read by someone else. Please bear that in
mind when deciding whether to send material in response to this message
by e-mail.

This e-mail (whether you are the sender or the recipient) may be
monitored, recorded and retained by the Ministry of Justice. E-mail
monitoring / blocking software may be used, and e-mail content may be
read at any time. You have a responsibility to ensure laws are not
broken when composing or forwarding e-mails and their contents.

Dear Ministry of Justice,

thanks for your response to my FOI request 113308. I would like to re-submit the same request but with the following limitations, which should hopefully bring it into the cost limit:

- emails sent by members of the "UK legal services and stakeholder relations team" (or its successor) within the International and Legal Services Policy Division of the Justice and Courts Policy Group AND
- emails containing the precise phrase "Leigh Day" in the subject or body of the message, in place of my earlier request for emails "concerning the firm Leigh Day".

The time period restriction of my earlier request stays the same.

I believe that the restriction to one team, and the use of a particular keyword, will allow you to run a nearly automated email search which will greatly reduce the staff time needed to retrieve the information held.

Yours faithfully,

John Roberts

Jarman, Steven (JPG), Ministry of Justice

1 Attachment

Dear Mr Roberts,

 

Please find attached a response to your recent Freedom of Information
request.

 

Many thanks,

 

Steven Jarman

Ministry of Justice

 

This e-mail (and any attachment) is intended only for the attention of
the addressee(s). Its unauthorised use, disclosure, storage or copying
is not permitted. If you are not the intended recipient, please destroy
all
copies and inform the sender by return e-mail.

Internet e-mail is not a secure medium. Any reply to this message
could be intercepted and read by someone else. Please bear that in
mind when deciding whether to send material in response to this message
by e-mail.

This e-mail (whether you are the sender or the recipient) may be
monitored, recorded and retained by the Ministry of Justice. E-mail
monitoring / blocking software may be used, and e-mail content may be
read at any time. You have a responsibility to ensure laws are not
broken when composing or forwarding e-mails and their contents.

Dear Ministry of Justice,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Ministry of Justice's handling of my FOI request 'Communications with SRA', your ref. 113781.

I do not believe that the s12 exemption was properly applied. Your answer notes that
"We believe that the cost of asking all the members of the International & Legal Services
Division (and relevant precursor teams) to search their emails, to look through all emails sent
and received from 1 January 2015 to the present date, to check which ones were to or from
the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and which of these might be about the law firm Leigh Day
would still exceed the appropriate limit."

However, this is not needed or appropriate for my request. I have asked for any emails which were sent from (or to) a specific team in the MOJ to the Solicitors Regulation Authority. The SRA uses the email domain "sra.org.uk", so it would simply be a matter of searching for all emails from and to "...@sra.org.uk", which is a simple email search that could either be done by individual staff members or, more easily, centrally by your IT services.

Secondly, I had not asked you to review each email to see whether it "might be about the law firm Leigh Day". This is a clear misrepresentation of my request. My request had been for emails containing "the precise phrase 'Leigh Day' in the body or subject of the message". I have written this specifically to allow for automated searching rather than manual review. You seem to have deliberately ignored this precision in my request.

To summarize, I had asked you to perform a seach (automated to the extent possible of emails)
- from or to a specific email domain
- sent or received after a given date
- containing a very specific phrase in either the subject or body of the message.

As any IT professional will be able to tell you, such a search can be performed easily and automatically, it does not require, as you seem to suggest, that individual staff members look through every single email in their inbox after 1 January 2015 to review whether it meets the above criteria. The suggestion that it does is absurd.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/c...

Yours faithfully,

John Roberts

Central Correspondence Team, Ministry of Justice

1 Attachment

Dear Mr Roberts

 

Please find attached the outcome of the internal review for FOI request
113781

 

Kind regards

Ministry of Justice

 

This e-mail (and any attachment) is intended only for the attention of
the addressee(s). Its unauthorised use, disclosure, storage or copying
is not permitted. If you are not the intended recipient, please destroy
all
copies and inform the sender by return e-mail.

Internet e-mail is not a secure medium. Any reply to this message
could be intercepted and read by someone else. Please bear that in
mind when deciding whether to send material in response to this message
by e-mail.

This e-mail (whether you are the sender or the recipient) may be
monitored, recorded and retained by the Ministry of Justice. E-mail
monitoring / blocking software may be used, and e-mail content may be
read at any time. You have a responsibility to ensure laws are not
broken when composing or forwarding e-mails and their contents.