I Wrote My Story. Now Write Yours.

Since publishing Without Prejudice – Part One, something has started happening that I probably should have anticipated. People have begun contacting me asking what they should do in their own court cases. Some want my opinion on their strategy. Others want to know whether they can have a chat with me about their particular circumstances.

So I need to clear something up.

Without Prejudice is not a how-to guide. It is not a manual for taking a case through the courts. It does not tell anybody how to conduct litigation, and it certainly doesn't qualify me to give legal advice.

In fact, the book specifically says so.

Most importantly, publishing a book about my own experiences does not suddenly make me an expert or an oracle on legal strategy or court procedure. I am not a solicitor. I am not a barrister. I am not presenting myself as either, and I have no intention of becoming an unofficial legal adviser or sounding board for other people's cases.

But there is something I would encourage people to do.

Write down what happened to you.

That is something entirely different.

One of the reasons I wrote Without Prejudice was because experiences disappear remarkably quickly when nobody records them. Events become anecdotes. Details are forgotten. Documents end up in drawers. People become exhausted, frustrated or simply relieved that an ordeal is over, and eventually the story goes no further.

And don't underestimate what the passage of time does to memory. We tend to think of memory as a recording that we can simply play back, but it isn't. Details fade, recollections change and, months or years later, you may remember something quite differently from what actually happened. That's another reason contemporaneous records matter.

Write it down. And, where it is lawful and appropriate to do so, tell people about it.

That doesn't necessarily mean writing a book. It could be an article. A blog. A carefully researched account. A submission to an organisation. A record kept for somebody who comes looking for it five years from now.

But create the record — and make sure it's backed up with actual facts and evidence.

Because if there are genuine problems within a system, those problems are much harder to dismiss when there are multiple documented experiences rather than isolated people quietly saying, "Something wasn't right."

I wrote Without Prejudice to document my experience. It contains the decisions I made, the mistakes I made — and believe me, I made quite a few — the arguments I encountered and the conclusions I reached. Readers are perfectly entitled to examine all of that and decide for themselves whether any of it is useful or relevant to them.

But their case is not my case. Their circumstances are not my circumstances. Each case is different.

And I cannot responsibly tell somebody, on the basis of a conversation or a few messages, what they should do in proceedings that may have very serious consequences for them. If you need legal advice, seek it from somebody qualified to provide it.

If you believe something important has happened to you, however, don't automatically assume that the only useful thing you can do is find somebody else and ask, "What should I do?"

Start with another question: "What happened?" Then document it.

Keep the letters. Keep the emails. Keep the orders. Build the chronology. Record the decisions and the consequences. Separate what you can prove from what you merely suspect. Be accurate. Be fair. And don't embellish something simply because embellishment makes a better story.

The facts should be interesting enough.

Perhaps most importantly, don't assume your experience has no value simply because you aren't a lawyer, journalist or academic.

You were there. You know what happened to you. Write it down.

That's exactly what I did.