A complicated conclusion

Those looking for a message to be drawn from the death of Matthew Courtney, the young Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer assistant who died on 9 February this year, will struggle to extrapolate much from this week’s inquest.

What the hearing in Southwark Coroner’s Court on Tuesday (14 May) did not offer was much support for suggestions that Freshfields was culpable for the 27-year-old’s death, either through neglect or overwork.

The inquest heard that Courtney, despite an excellent academic record, had suffered some personal problems long before joining Freshfields as a trainee in 2004. According to evidence given by his father, George, the death of a close friend in a car accident in 1998, while Courtney was at Oxford University, hit his son hard.

Courtney Snr told the inquest that his son had been given a spiked drink at a party the following year, which had been loaded with illegal drugs. The two events apparently contributed to depression that saw Courtney seek professional help and miss two terms at university.

Medical evidence given at the inquest said Courtney had suffered from bi-polar affective disorder, more commonly known as manic depression, possibly linked to drug intake.

Despite a relapse in 2001, Courtney graduated in 2002. He was to receive treatment after that until he was completely discharged from mental care in November 2006, by which time he had also stopped taking any medication.

Courtney Snr told the inquest that his son had appeared to be “in good spirits” in Christmas 2006.

Likewise, he added that his son had generally enjoyed his time at Freshfields, where he had qualified in October 2006 in the intellectual property department. Though the young lawyer did mention his workload to his parents, Courtney Snr felt his son could manage.

There was, by all accounts, also no clear sign that Courtney’s mental health was suffering in the immediate run-up to his death, though he had telephoned his consultant psychiatrist on 8 February. Courtney told the psychiatrist during the call that he was working long hours during that period - on some occasions between 8am and 10pm - as he was working on two large projects at the same time. He also complained of trouble sleeping but the inquest heard that the psychiatrist felt there was “no sense of relapse”.

Giving evidence, a colleague who shared an office with Courtney for five months noticed no obvious sign of mental distress on the day of his death. Having mentioned that he was hungry, his co-worker assumed that Courtney had left the office sometime after 8.30pm that evening to get some food.

The inquest heard that Courtney had gone alone to the Tate Modern art gallery in central London. A witness heard a crash at around 11:00pm, at which point it was discovered that Courtney had fallen around 80 ft from a seventh-floor balcony. An ambulance arrived 15 minutes later but he was pronounced dead at the scene at around midnight.

The attending police officer said, in his opinion, Courtney had accidentally slipped after sitting on the banister rail. A post mortem found no evidence that alcohol was a factor in the death.

On learning of Courtney’s death, his girlfriend voiced fears that he had deliberately taken his own life. The coroner, John Sampson, said there was some evidence to suggest suicide.

He also said that it was possible that work pressures had contributed to Courtney’s mental strain but concluded that there was no evidence he had suffered any stress outside the normal bounds of a “high-powered career”.

On the balance of probabilities, he recorded a verdict of accidental death, rather than the other likely option of an open verdict. Courtney’s parents said they were satisfied with the verdict. As Sampson himself told the inquest, he was forced to come to a “complicated conclusion” regarding the case.

As such, what lessons can be learned from the ambivalent verdict are not clear. While news of his death in February sparked an intense debate regarding the personal toll of City life and long hours, the facts of the case refuse to fit into any neat boxes.

But while there is no evidence to suggest that Freshfields had shown any lack of care towards Courtney, the case is unlikely to be forgotten in the City, either by law firms or assistants.

City life is not getting any less stressful – quite the reverse. The debate regarding the impact of stress on young lawyers is only getting started.

alex.novarese@legalweek.com; charlotte.edmond@legalweek.com