Earlier Sunday Times article about Unity Bank

SUNDAY TIMES: April 22 2001 ECOSSE: FEATURES

Martin Frost takes on legal cases nobody else wants including the House of Usher's claim - and he's not even a lawyer, writes Marcello Mega.

Picture of Frost  outside Edenside.

Picture Caption: Paying court: Martin Frost lives like a lord at Edenside House in Kelso, but the source of his income is hard to define: 'Consultancy work; some of it business, some of it legal. This and that, you know'. Photograph: Katie Lee

For hire to fight the law

Martin Frost is not an easy man to pin down. At Edenside House at Kelso and the three acres that surround his historic home, there are obvious signs of wealth. But Frost is deliberately vague about how he earns a crust.

Like the aristocrat in a Billy Connolly story about the difference between the high-born and the rest, Frost feels no need to justify his comfortable lifestyle. Asked what he does for a living, Connolly's aristocrat tells dinner party guests that he toboggans. Frost might just as easily reply that he makes mischief or that he amuses himself by embarrassing the powerful, but instead he offers, "Consultancy work; some of it business, some of it legal. This and that, you know".

If there is a new type of Scottish aristocracy emerging, Frost could easily claim membership. His spectacular 18th-century home boasts an Adams fireplace, some impressive works of art and a place in the history books. One of his guest bedrooms was occupied by Bonnie Prince Charlie on an overnight stay during his flight from Scotland.

Frost also rubs shoulders with the establishment figures who dominate the exclusive New Club in Edinburgh's Princes Street. Yet being a fairly  gruff Englishman, born in Stafford and raised in Lancashire, he is aware that he is very much the outsider. That seems to suit him, for he is often to be found crossing swords in court with those he sits beside at lunch.

In recent years, Frost has become a semi-professional party litigant, spending more time in court than most Scottish lawyers. Not only does he represent himself in actions involving his own affairs, principally a multi-million-pound claim against the Unity Trust Bank, he has for some time been buying up the rights to other people's legal fights and pursuing their debtors.

But he will not be drawn on the scale of his business. Whether motivated by the profits or the fun, he has joined forces with Andrew McNamara, a west coast property developer, and they are to form a company which they laughingly refer to as Screw - this being an indication of what they believe many lawyers do to their clients. They established contact after stories about both their legal disputes appeared in The Sunday Times and have found themselves increasingly drawn to one another. McNamara has now assigned Frost to a number of claims he is pursuing against lawyers who have represented him in past actions.

Earlier this month they revealed they had bought into the legal claim of one of Scotland's real blue bloods, Stuart Usher, a man whose family once owned vast chunks of prime land in Scotland as well as two thirds of its whisky industry.

Usher has fallen on hard times, selling hot dogs on the A68 and driving taxis to make ends meet. He blames Brodies, the law firm, claiming that it mishandled the family's affairs when two successive heirs had Down's syndrome. For some years, Usher was unable to find a lawyer willing to take the case on a no-win no-fee basis. But Frost and McNamara have now issued a summons against Brodies for GBP 365m. Brodies dispute the claim.

It would be tempting to present Frost as a patron saint of lost causes, and he might appreciate such a description, but the reality is that he is motivated by cash and by the intellectual tussling with lawyers. If the action against Brodies is even partially successful, he and McNamara will do very well, although the bulk of any settlement would go to Usher.

An hour in conversation with Frost leaves no room for doubt about his brainpower. Many of his recent legal actions - he has more than 60 running in courts north and south of the border - have turned on the European Convention on Human Rights.

"Many senior lawyers, and I include members of the judiciary, are lazy with the law," he says. "They tackle new developments when they crop up in their court rather than getting on top of them in advance. In that respect, I think I know the law better than most of them do."

The library at Edenside boasts the standard texts crucial to the understanding and practice of Scots law and its English neighbour, as well as the increasingly important influence of Europe. Frost can pull the weighty volumes from the shelves and talk with authority about the cases within, finding the relevant pages with an ease that betrays intimate knowledge of the contents.

But there is undoubtedly a darker side to Frost. His associates confirm he has a ruthless streak and this can show itself in his private life.

When he and his wife, Linda, became estranged two years ago, Frost publicised his concerns about friendships she had struck up with a priest and a laywoman at the local Episcopal Church by leaving leaflets at the back of the church - an action that provoked a breach of the peace charge.

His past business associates include the Duke of Roxburghe, the oil tycoon James Longcroft, and James Gulliver, who played a prominent part in the affairs of Guinness. He was also closely linked to Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, the former Labour prime ministers, undertaking fundraising for the party and providing personal financial advice.

But his track record is mixed. He has made and lost fortunes, and has only been discharged from insolvency in the past year or so. It is difficult to understand how a man with his knowledge and contacts could end up insolvent. He is reluctant to be drawn on this. But there is little doubt that one effect of the insolvency, which took him out of the mainstream business world, was to whet his appetite for a legal fight.

A regular source of work and income comes to him from the banks. If they are having difficulty recovering a small debt of a few thousand pounds and they estimate that the cost of pursuing it using their own lawyers might wipe out any benefit, they are often willing to assign the debt, for a small fee, to a bounty hunter such as Frost. As he does not instruct lawyers, preferring to represent himself, he does not incur large costs.

But he makes mistakes and, when he loses, he recovers nothing and risks having to meet the other side's legal fees. His record so far, however, indicates that he usually chooses well. It gives him no little satisfaction to state that lawyers are among the parties he has taken money from in this way.

Frost and McNamara have both enjoyed the cut and thrust of being party litigants and, for Frost in particular, it has become something of a hobby.

When outlining a mischievous case to a listener, he constantly asks, "Does that amuse you?" But he and McNamara now intend to put themselves on a more professional footing by making themselves available to anyone with a legal grievance they believe they can take forward.

While McNamara takes a dim view of all lawyers and urges anybody who has been "screwed" to get in touch, Frost adopts a more diplomatic position.

"Lawyers are no different from anyone else," he says. "There are good ones and bad ones, honest ones and dishonest ones. But whatever category they are in, if they make mistakes on your behalf or represent you badly, it can be difficult to rectify. Most people don't even know that they have an automatic right to refer a solicitor's bill to the court auditor for taxation. So if people do have a claim and don't know how to pursue it, we'll pursue it for them."

For a price, of course.
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