There is a wonderful idea in Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind: the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a labyrinthine repository for books which the world has mislaid, neglected or simply ceased to remember. Over the last year or so, this website has been in some danger of becoming the digital equivalent. It was still here. The articles were still here. People still found them through Google. But very little was happening. The law moved on, as law tends to do, whilst Credit Hire Barrister sat quietly in its corner of the internet accumulating virtual dust.
That was not really good enough. Credit hire has occupied a substantial part of my professional life for nearly thirty years. I was doing this work before Dimond v Lovell reached the House of Lords, and I have watched the subject develop from arguments about the enforceability of credit agreements into the formidable body of law and litigation which exists today. Over the years I have acted for claimants, defendants, insurers and credit hire organisations. I have dealt with impecuniosity, basic hire rates, need, period, enforceability, mitigation, taxi and commercial vehicle claims, fraud and fundamental dishonesty, disclosure, evidence, appeals and costs. More recently the subject has led into questions concerning non-party costs and the liabilities of credit hire companies themselves, including the Court of Appeal decision in Tescher v Direct Accident Management Ltd [2025] EWCA Civ 733.
So I have rebuilt the website.
The interesting part is how it has been done. I have not instructed a firm of web designers and then spent several weeks exchanging emails about fonts, menus and what somebody thinks a barrister’s website ought to look like. Instead, the rebuilding has largely been undertaken using ChatGPT and what is now rather loosely called “vibe coding”. In essence, I have been able to describe what I wanted the website to do, identify what was wrong with it, look at the result, criticise it, change my mind, and then have the next iteration implemented. ChatGPT has been used to analyse the structure, work out what needed to change, formulate the instructions and assist with the words. AI tools have then been used to make changes within WordPress itself.
This should not be confused with pressing a button and asking a machine to make everything lovely. It does not work like that. On several occasions the machine has confidently done precisely the wrong thing. The useful part of the process is the combination of human judgment and machine implementation: deciding what the website is actually for, breaking the work into stages, making changes, looking at what has really happened on the screen, and correcting them. In that sense “vibe coding” is perhaps a slightly frivolous expression for something rather more interesting. A person who cannot code can increasingly direct quite sophisticated changes to a website in ordinary English. The limiting factor becomes less the ability to manipulate WordPress and more the ability to decide what ought to be there in the first place.
The purpose of all this is not simply to have a prettier website. It is to give me somewhere to write again. There is a lot happening in credit hire, and much of it is interesting. Arguments about impecuniosity and rates have not disappeared, but they now sit alongside questions concerning evidence, data, enforceability, credit repair, regulation, claims management companies, insurance, litigation funding, costs and the circumstances in which the commercial entities standing behind litigation may themselves become exposed to liability. Credit hire has always been an unusual mixture of tort, contract, consumer law, evidence and civil procedure. That mixture is becoming more, rather than less, complicated.
Accordingly, there will be a new programme of articles and papers on this site. Some will deal with new cases. Others will revisit old problems which have acquired new significance. I also intend to look rather more closely at the commercial and regulatory structure surrounding credit hire and credit repair. One of the virtues of having practised in both credit hire and costs is that I tend to be interested in what happens around the edges of the conventional claim: who is funding the litigation, what the contractual documents actually do, where the economic risk lies, what happens when things go wrong and, ultimately, who may be required to pay.
That also describes the sort of work I am now interested in doing. I am not attempting to recreate a diary filled with routine low-value credit hire trials. There are many excellent barristers who do that work every day. My interest is in substantial and difficult cases: large hire claims; taxi, fleet and profit-earning vehicle cases; cases involving difficult questions of impecuniosity or rates; disputes concerning agreements and enforceability; allegations of fraud or fundamental dishonesty; cases involving unusual evidential or procedural problems; and cases which are likely to go on appeal or which raise a point of principle. I am equally interested in cases where credit hire overlaps with costs, insurance, litigation funding or claims management regulation.
Nor does the work have to begin with a brief for a trial. Often the most useful involvement of specialist counsel is much earlier. I can advise on merits and strategy, settle pleadings, review witness evidence and documentary material, advise upon disclosure, consider expert or rates evidence, conduct conferences and help to identify which points are worth fighting and which are not. I act for claimants, defendants, insurers and credit hire organisations. Having spent many years seeing how substantial credit hire claims are constructed, I am equally comfortable considering how one should be defended.
So the doors of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books have been opened again. Much of the old material remains, because a surprising amount of it remains useful. But the purpose of the rebuild is principally about what comes next.
There is, I think, plenty to write about.