Case No. EWFC-43

21.It was some time after this, in or about August 2022, that the wife took advice from Mr Burrows, a Solicitor. The wife’s activities since this time appear to have been recommended to her by and led by Mr Burrows.22.With Mr Burrows came a rather different focus. He decided that what happened in March 2021 should not have happened and has expended his considerable energies in trying to overturn the March 2021 Consent Order. Further, in dialogue with Mr Burrows before me, he appeared to be contemplating (as part of the ways forward in the mix) a potential negligence claim against the wife’s previous legal team for their part in the March 2021 events.23.I shall descend below into the detail of the applications and submissions and actions pursued by Mr Burrows on behalf of the wife since August 2022 in this context, but at this stage I shall express my overall view of what has happened since then, which is that the steps taken by him have involved an extraordinarily high degree of ill judgment. An email sent to me by Mr Burrows on 14th February 2023 (yesterday), and copied to Ms Bangay, suggested that he plans other attacks on the March 2021 events – now threatening Judicial Review proceedings against the Ministry of Justice seeking, amongst other things, a “mandatory order requiring this court to comply with United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 Art 12” – for me, a further demonstration of Mr Burrows’ troublingly high degree of ill judgment about this case. Further, as I was preparing to send out my judgment by email this afternoon I received a further email from Mr Burrows, now annexing a Judicial Review Pre-Action Protocol letter raising a whole array of extraordinary requests, asking me to vacate the hearing fixed for 2nd March 2023 and indicating that he would be applying for an order in the Administrative Court to remove the case from my list on 2nd March 2023 if I did not agree. I regard these suggestions and applications as bizarre, certainly unprecedented in my legal and judicial experience. If a High Court Judge in the Administrative Court orders me to vacate the hearing then I shall of course comply, but (absent that) I propose to continue with the hearing as previously directed.24.I do not believe I have been given a figure for all the bills raised by Mr Burrows to his own client since August 2022, but I would be surprised if it were not a significant sum as his charge out rate on the one schedule I do have is £320 plus VAT per hour and he has plainly spent many hours on the case. Inevitably, this has led to the husband incurring significant further legal costs in response to these steps, the overall figure suggested is £59,935 up to and including 9th February 2023.