The Bolam test is the common-law standard the courts use to decide whether a professional has fallen below the standard of care owed to a client. It originates in medical negligence but applies across the professions, including solicitors. For solicitors, it sits alongside the SRA Standards and Regulations and shapes how professional indemnity claims are defended.
In Bolam v Friern Hospital Management Committee [1957] 1 WLR 582, a patient receiving electro-convulsive therapy suffered fractures after the treatment was given without muscle relaxants and without restraints. The medical evidence showed two schools of thought on the right protocol. McNair J directed the jury that a doctor is not negligent if acting in accordance with a practice accepted as proper by a responsible body of medical opinion, even if other practitioners would have taken a different course. That direction became the test.
The test was refined in Bolitho v City and Hackney Health Authority [1998] AC 232. The body of opinion relied on must itself withstand logical analysis. The court will not defer to a practice that cannot be defended on its reasoning, however widely held.
The principle was confirmed for solicitors in Saif Ali v Sydney Mitchell & Co [1980] AC 198. The House of Lords abolished the immunity from suit that solicitors had previously enjoyed for work intimately connected with the conduct of litigation. From that point, a solicitor's conduct could be measured against the standard of the reasonably competent practitioner of the same kind.
In Edward Wong Finance Co Ltd v Johnson Stokes & Master [1984] AC 296, the Privy Council went further in a conveyancing context. The defendant firm had followed a Hong Kong practice known as completion 'in the Hong Kong style' that was widespread locally. The court accepted that the practice was common but held it nonetheless to be negligent because it carried a foreseeable risk that any responsible practitioner ought to have guarded against. Common practice is evidence of competence; it is not conclusive.
In conveyancing, expert evidence from senior practitioners is admitted on whether a particular search or enquiry was within the range of what a responsible body of conveyancing solicitors would have done. The court weighs the realities of high-volume residential work against the duty owed to the individual client.
In litigation, the courts look at tactical and procedural decisions through the lens of Saif Ali. A judgment call made on the information reasonably available at the time is unlikely to be negligent merely because, with hindsight, a different course would have served the client better.
In White v Jones [1995] 2 AC 207, the House of Lords confirmed that a solicitor instructed to prepare a will owes a duty of care to the intended beneficiary. The Bolam standard applies to the drafting and execution steps: whether a responsible body of will-drafting practice would have proceeded as the defendant did.
The SRA Standards and Regulations, including the Code of Conduct for Solicitors, RELs and RFLs, set the regulatory floor. A breach of the Code is not automatically negligence, and compliance with the Code is not automatically a defence. The Code and the common-law duty run in parallel: the court takes the Code into account as evidence of what a competent solicitor would do, while Bolam asks whether a responsible body of practice would have acted in the same way.
The following is a worked example for illustration only. A solicitor acting on a residential purchase does not order a particular environmental search. The buyer is later faced with a liability and a claim is brought against the firm. Two expert solicitors give evidence. One says a competent conveyancer would have ordered the search. The other says a responsible body of conveyancing practice, on that type of property and absent a trigger in the title, would not.
Applied straightforwardly, Bolam means the defendant is not negligent if a responsible body of conveyancing opinion would have acted in the same way. The court then applies the Bolitho gloss and asks whether that body of opinion is logically defensible. If it is, the claim fails on breach.
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