The senior partners in a firm of South Yorkshire solicitors have been paid almost £30 million for settling thousands of compensation claims on behalf of dead or sick miners.

Until late 2003, Beresfords’ head office was to be found among a shabby line of redbrick terraced buildings on tired and dust-stained Balby Road in Doncaster. Near-neighbours on the street included a Chinese takeaway and Lorraine’s Café.

The premises are now boarded up and for sale. Beresfords no longer needs them because in November 2003 the firm moved into a luxurious £4.8 million lakeside development at Quay Point in Doncaster.

An ocean of shimmering glass fronts the new 38,000sq ft office, big enough to house the 200 employees who, the solicitors’ website announced in 2003, would be housed together for the first time since the rapid growth of the firm.

When the firm’s three partners — Jim Beresford, 55, his daughter Esta, 27, and Doug Smith, 48 — gaze from their “magnificent boardroom overlooking the lake”, they may well reflect on the wisdom of recognising the potential for expansion and glittering profits via the coal health compensation schemes.

To date, Beresfords — which in 2004 was describing itself as “a unique law firm . . . dealing with industrial disease and personal injury claims only” — has registered 80,474 chest disease claims on behalf of miners and their families, more than any other solicitors’ practice in the country.

Only 15,713 — less than 20 per cent — of those claims have so far been settled, yet the Department of Trade and Industry has already paid Beresfords a total of £27.2 million in legal costs.

If all the remaining cases were successfully settled on the same basis, the firm potentially could receive a further £100 million from the public purse.

Beresfords has enjoyed a close working relationship with the Union of Democratic Mineworkers and Vendside, the claims-handling company owned by the union, which chose to pass on several thousand of its cases to be dealt with by the Doncaster solicitors.

And as the three leading individuals at the UDM have flourished financially, so have their friends at Beresfords. The profits allocated to Mr Beresford in 2002 and 2003, the most recent year for which his limited liability partnership has returned a financial statement, totalled £1.4 million.

Meanwhile, Mr Smith has been busy spending his money. In November 2003 he sold his modern, red-brick house at Tickhill, near Doncaster, for £340,000.

Three months earlier he had spent £840,000 to buy Noblethorpe Hall, a Grade II-listed Victorian country property with seven bedrooms, four reception rooms, grand hall, scullery, butler’s pantry and cellars, set in 18 acres of parkland, including a ha-ha and folly.

In the past few weeks Mr Smith has also spent more than £200,000 on two cars, an Aston Martin DB9 and a Bentley Arnage.

(Originally published by The Times on June 28, 2005)

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