A report can be found (without a pay wall) in the Daily Mail Online http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2670479/Families-failed-win-compensation-flawed-MMR-research-suing-lawyers-pursuing-hopeless-claims-making-millions-legal-aid.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490
and also in the Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/26/mmr-autism-lawyers-sued-hodge-jones-allen-claim-legal-aid.
The Daily Mail does not mention "unjust enrichment". The Guardian, which starts as reporting what the Times has reported, does. Both, however, then go on "McCafferty, 23, from Falkirk, central Scotland, is seeking damages to "include compensation, distress, expense and inconvenience of engaging in hopeless litigation".
It might be possibly that his lawyer has put in the "unjust enrichment" bit not so as to seek the enrichment, but to plead some sort of intentional tort, since it is odd to describe someone as knowingly and for gain litigating a hopeless claim as "negligent"; "distress" one of the heads of damage mentioned. Perhaps it is a sort of Wilkinson v Downton claim in that respect.

John Blackie
________________________________________
From: Martin Hogg [mhogg@staffmail.ed.ac.uk]
Sent: 26 June 2014 18:23
To: obligations@uwo.ca
Subject: Unjust enrichment claim (?) by MMR autism victim

I note from a story in today's Times newspaper - http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/law/article4130409.ece (behind a paywall I'm afraid) - that a man who claims to suffer autism as a result of receiving the MMR vaccination is suing London law firm Hodge, Jones & Allen claiming that the litigation they instigated on his behalf to recover losses arising from the vaccination was negligently carried out and raised too late.

More interestingly, I see the Times reports that he is also suing for the firm's "unjust enrichment as officers of the court by litigating a hopeless claim funded by legal aid by which you profited". Assuming this to be a direct quotation from the pleadings against HJ & A, and that this ground of claim is therefore based upon unjust enrichment, it seems to have an obvious difficulty with it: I cannot see how any enrichment that the firm may have gained was at the expense of the claimant, if it was funded by legal aid. If anyone has lost out here, it is surely the Legal Aid Agency.

However, I have not been able to discover any more about the pleadings. If anyone can throw more light on this case, I should be interested to hear. (I am assuming that a claim has been raised in the English courts, though the claimant - Matthew McCafferty - is said in the newspaper report to live In Falkirk.)

Martin Hogg
Edinburgh Law School
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