In 2010 I started to stumble when it came to the "disclosure" phase of the trial. This is where each side is legally required to disclose any documents or evidence which are relevant to your case. You must disclose both those documents which help and hurt your case. It is illegal to willingly withhold a document that is detrimental to your case.

With no legal background, I found it difficult to discern what documents would be deemed relevant. I had 8 years' worth of emails. I thought they were all relevant and lacked the technical legal ability to discern,  so I sent the other side nearly everything I had. But the courts can see this as obfuscation which although it a well-known legal tactic, it's not one I was deliberately using. Standen's lawyers leaped upon the opportunity to cry foul and send me angry notices.

Though I had fought a formidable battle on my own for nearly two years it was clear I was now out of my depth and in desperate need of help. A friend advised that because Standen had such high-profile lawyers I should find equally powerful lawyers. But how would I do that?

Think! Think! Think!

I put my IT skills to work and wrote a program that scrapes the email address of every commercial business lawyer in the country from the Law Society website. Then I prepared a password-protected website that included a timeline of my case complete with links to supporting evidence.   

I mass emailed an introduction to hundreds if not thousands of UK lawyers inviting them to check out my password-protected site. From this, I managed to find 5-8 law firms willing to take me on a CFA. I chose Joseph Kovsky at Rochman Landau who promised he could get Mark Blackett-Ord as my barrister. 

Blackett-Ord is the guy the UK government goes to when seeking an expert on Company Law because he (very literally) wrote the book on it. I figured if Standen had some of the most powerful lawyers in the world, I'd have to try and keep up. Later on in the trial, the judge would sarcastically remark on how overblown our legal representation was in relation to the size of the case.

Despite years of trying to avoid Standen's showy excesses, he still managed to drag me into this grandiose, over-elaborate ego-fest and ridiculously expensive battle of the legal titans.