John McDonnell KC
December 2, 2015
In 2004 John McDonnell founded Thirteen Old Square Chambers which merged with 3 Stone Buildings in 2016 to form Three Stone where he is now Head of Chambers.
He is one of the most senior Chancery Silks.
He has always enjoyed an unusually varied practice as can be seen from the list of his reported cases.
He has been admitted to the Bar for the purpose of local cases in Hong Kong, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, the Irish Republic, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man.
He has been appearing regularly in Hong Kong since 1978 and has won a succession of landmark property cases in the Court of Final Appeal.
The cases which have given him most satisfaction were
- Lloyds Bank Pension Trust v Lloyds Bank plc [1996] PLR 263 where he appeared for a representative member of the Bank’s Pension Scheme and defeated an attempt by the Bank and the Trustees to level down the benefits of female pensioners, earning the editorial comment in the Pensions Law Reports: “There have been some bizarre decisions recently in the pensions field, but this one takes the biscuit!”
- Re OT Computers Ltd [2004] Ch 317 where he established that the Third Parties (Rights against Insurers) Act 1930 applies to all insurable liabilities and is not limited to motor insurance.
- Fok Lai-ying v The Governor in Council [1997] HKLRD 810 where he persuaded the Privy Council to make a landmark decision about the Hong Kong Bill of Rights only weeks before Hong Kong was returned to China
- Barclays Bank v TOSG Trust Fund [1984] AC 626 which his Leader (now Lord Millett) still describes as the most difficult case he ever argued and which explains the Rule against Double Proof in the law of insolvency
- Brackenbank Lodge Ltd v Peart [1996] NPC 124 (HL) in which Lord Browne-Wilkinson said “Mr McDonnell’s written case is an outstanding piece of research and scholarship” and
- The two leading cases of Gillet v Holt [2001] Ch 210 and Thorner v Major [2009] 1 WLR 776 (HL) which have definitively laid down the modern law of proprietary estoppel.