He was perhaps one of the most successful and well-connected solicitors in London. Such was his influence that the magazine Private Eye styled him “Freeman of the City of London”. A confidante of prime ministers from Harold Wilson to Margaret Thatcher, David Freeman built his firm from small beginnings into one of the largest and most profitable in the capital.
For many in the Establishment of the 1960s and 1970s, he became the go-to man in a crisis, sometimes working in tandem with his close friend Lord Goodman to ensure that, as far as possible, any unwanted drama was diffused. Among his clients was David Holmes, one of the defendants in the Jeremy Thorpe trial.
It was Goodman who suggested to Wilson that he seek libel advice from Freeman when a caricature depicting him in the nude was used by the group the Move to promote their single Flowers in the Rain. Freeman duly obliged — though some might have felt that Wilson’s amour-propre was overindulged when it was ruled, in 1967, that all the royalties from the song would be paid not to the musicians but to a charity of the prime minister’s choice.
Freeman worked with many stars of the postwar Bar who ended up as Law Lords, senior law officers or government ministers. He often briefed Derry Irvine (later Lord Chancellor) whose law chambers gave tenure to a promising young barrister, Tony Blair. Though Freeman considered himself a man of the left, he particularly enjoyed the company of Margaret Thatcher over dinner.
His practice, DJ Freeman, began as a one-man operation in 1952 shortly after he qualified as a solicitor — “It was very risky. I was 24 years old, had a six-month-old son, and both my father and father-in-law tried to dissuade me. They thought I was crazy.” He proved them wrong. It evolved into a leading City firm with more than 50 partners.
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Several of the cases he was involved in became landmarks in legal history. Byrne v Heller in the House of Lords was crucial to establishing the law of professional negligence. The Pergamon case, in which he advised Robert Maxwell (who stood accused of improper stewardship of a publically quoted company), established that those subject to administrative or judicial inquiry should be allowed to respond to criticisms made in the draft stages of any report.
Working with Maxwell was never dull. When he was summoned by Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) inspectors who were investigating his company, Pergamon Press, Freeman accompanied him and witnessed his client charge into the inspectors’ room, bellowing: “I am Robert Maxwell, member of parliament, holder of the Military Cross.” When the session ended Freeman pulled him aside and said, “Bob, who do you think they thought you were?”
Another area in which Freeman and his firm excelled was corporate insolvency. The high-profile collapses he helped to resolve included Fire Auto & Marine (the empire of the fraudster Emil Savundra) and BCCI (the Bank of Credit and Commercial International), which was one of the ten largest private banks in the world before its collapse.
He gained a reputation for being able to calm angry creditors and perhaps for this reason, in 1977, was appointed to head a DTI investigation into the demise of AEG Telefunken UK and Credit Collections. No other practising solicitor had ever led such an inquiry which, by tradition, had always been entrusted to a top Silk.
The paternalistic ethos of DJ Freeman was a reflection of its founder: he was generous to his articled clerks and even to prospective ones. When a young man arrived for an interview without a winter coat on a bitterly cold day, Freeman realised it was because he could not afford one. After the interview he handed him some money and insisted that he buy a coat in John Lewis. The man was later taken on as a junior at the firm.
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His practice was also a driving force in the promotion of women in the legal world. In the 1980s, a time when only five per cent of the partners in most City firms were women, the figure at DJ Freeman rose to 40 per cent. The firm introduced maternity leave and part-time partnerships.
David John Freeman was born in 1928 in a working-class area of Cardiff, where his father was employed as a tailor’s cutter. He was also a talented pianist who provided accompaniments to silent films.
Freeman was partly raised in London’s East End, to which his parents moved in 1933. They later settled in the more mellow surrounds of Golders Green. He passed his 11-plus and was accepted into Christ’s College, Finchley, where he excelled “in running, football and history — in that order”.
A keen boy scout, he camped out on farms most weekends and would later insist that the scout movement was even more influential on him than his National Service. He hoped to secure a place at Balliol College, Oxford — his headmaster suggested he should aim for a history scholarship — but his father told him he should get a job instead. The sense of an opportunity lost never quite left him.
He was happily married for nearly 50 years to Iris Alberge, an educational psychologist who later trained as an employment law solicitor and became a partner in his firm. She also wrote a highly regarded biography of Lord Denning, the former master of the rolls.
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Together they had three children. Their sons, Michael and Peter, both fulfilled their father’s dream of reading history at Balliol and qualified as solicitors at DJ Freeman. They later co-founded (with their father’s support) the Argent property group, which is best known for its regeneration of the land behind King’s Cross and St Pancras stations. Jill, their daughter, is a former producer-director of LWT’s South Bank Show. Iris died in 1997, after which Freeman married Connie Levy, who survives him together with his three children.
In 2003 — more than ten years after its founder retired — DJ Freeman was divided up, having become too large and unwieldy. The corporate, insurance and litigation sections were renamed Kendall Freeman, while the property and media interests were subsumed into Olswang, the international legal conglomerate.
While devoted to his work and family, Freeman always had time for his friends, good causes and reading voraciously. He served for several years on the Board of Deputies of British Jews and was a supporter of the children’s charity Barnado’s, financing the Freeman Family Centre in Harlesden, London. He kept in touch with leaders of the Golders Green scouts group and ensured that the bill for any boy who could not afford to go on camp was paid.
For all his success in the legal world, he might have followed a very different path. At the start of the Sixties he was invited by Brian Epstein to help to manage a little known band called the Beatles. He declined, choosing instead to build his practice.
David Freeman, lawyer, was born on February 25, 1928. He died on February 23, 2015, aged 86