Solicitor who betrayed disabled people after they sought discrimination justice is struck off

Disabled campaigners betrayed by a solicitor who took many high-profile cases of disability discrimination have spoken of the significant harm he caused, after he was finally struck off by a tribunal.

For years, Chris Fry (pictured), from Sheffield, took on discrimination cases on behalf of disabled people who had faced discrimination in access to goods and services, particularly during the pandemic.

His pandemic cases covered access to healthcare, discrimination by supermarkets, and the government’s failure to provide British Sign Language interpreters at televised COVID-19 briefings.

His company, Fry Law, also acted for disabled people claiming discrimination by bus and train companies, and Fry worked pro bono for disabled activists opposed to the legalisation of assisted suicide on a high-profile judicial review case.

Many of those cases were reported on by Disability News Service (DNS), coverage which is certain to have encouraged more disabled people to ask Fry to take on their cases.

But less well-known were the many cases Fry agreed to take on that eventually collapsed because he failed to meet legal deadlines.

DNS itself was slow to report on early concerns about Fry and his administrative failings.

His previous law firm, Unity Law, was placed into administration in 2017, and later dissolved.

His next law firm, Fry Law, was eventually placed into administration four years ago amid multiple complaints about significant administrative failings.

That led to him being fined thousands of pounds in 2023, after the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal found his actions had failed to maintain “public trust” and confidence in the legal profession.

He was able to continue working as a solicitor, although the tribunal imposed a three-year restriction order on the management responsibilities he was allowed to carry out.

But the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has now ordered Fry to be struck off as a solicitor after it found that he failed to disclose proceeds from the sale of his home as part of the earlier tribunal case.

Although he attended part of this week’s tribunal, he left the online hearing and did not return after the panel retired to consider his application for an adjournment.

The tribunal ordered him to be struck off and to pay more than £32,000 in costs.

The case against Fry was taken by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

Among Fry’s high-profile successes was in acting for disabled campaigner Doug Paulley in the ground-breaking case he took against FirstGroup, which saw the Supreme Court establish a key principle on access to buses for wheelchair-users.

Paulley said this week that Fry had taken on more cases than he could cope with, which resulted in many disabled people seeing their discrimination cases collapsing because of missed deadlines, amplifying their distress.

He said he was “glad that the continued risk Fry posed of continuing to wreck disabled people’s cases, jobs and lives through his profound flakiness and his inability to own concerns or criticisms has finally been limited by him being struck off”.

But he added: “There are no winners in this.

“Fry is a human being, and I hope he is physically OK. And when he was on the ball, he could be an excellent ally and litigator for disabled people’s rights.

“But he was so destructive, causing so many disabled clients, associates and employees such massive distress.

“So many employees, counsel and associates went unpaid; so many disabled clients had their cases wrecked by his flakiness and failure to recognise his limitations and arrange for support.”

Paulley, who has done more than anyone to raise concerns about Fry’s failings in recent years, said he wished he had done even more.

And he said he wished the tribunal had also addressed the harm Fry had caused to so many disabled people whose cases he had wrecked.

Paulley said part of the problem had been that there were so few solicitors willing to take on disability discrimination cases, which meant Fry was often the only option for disabled people in desperate need of legal assistance.

He said: “The whole thing is very sad, and affects so many.

“But at least other disabled people are protected from him from now on, even if the past can’t be righted and the systems that resulted in us having to rely on him are still unchanged.”

One case affected by Fry’s failings involved campaign group York Accessibility Action (YAA), which crowdfunded more than £10,000 to fight a decision by City of York Council to ban blue badge-holders from their city centre.

YAA used the money to instruct Fry to act on its behalf with a legal case against the “discriminatory” actions of the council.

But he missed the deadline to take the case forward, which meant disabled people had to wait until May 2023 for a new administration running the council to lift the ban.

Disabled campaigner Flick Williams, who was involved with the separate Reverse the Ban campaign in York, said yesterday (Wednesday): “Disabled people in York were badly let down by Chris Fry.

“I remember clearly a room full of hopeful faces as Fry outlined his legal strategy to challenge the blatantly discriminatory policy adopted by City of York Council – and then failed to act to fulfil that promise, until we were legally out of time to pursue it.

“He took our money and then totally failed us, and I cannot forgive him for that.

“The stories of people unable to access their own city and everything in it were heart-rending.

“Legal action might well have meant those people who had no other means of getting into the city would not have been excluded for four long years until we elected a new administration in May 2023.”

Another disabled campaigner described Fry as “initially charming and passionate” when she approached him to take on a disability discrimination case, but she said this disguised his administrative incompetence and other failings, and that she found him “lazy and greedy”.

She said: “I’ve become ill with stress because of his negligence.

“I fear he has misled many other disabled people by hoping that our fatigue from fighting our cases will help disguise his shortfalls.”

Fry did not respond to a request to comment on the case yesterday (Wednesday).

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