You're misunderstanding. Bennell WAS scouting for City in the period relevant to this case and, as far as I can see, no one disputes that. The issue is that, for City to be liable to pay compensation to the victims of Bennell's crimes, a doctrine called 'vicarious liability' needs to be applicable, which means that one party bears civil liability for the wrongs of another. That can occur in a range of situations, but is encountered most commonly where there's an employer-employee relationship between the vicariously liable party and the one who committed the wrongs.
There's a whole body of case law determining what does and doesn't constitute an employer-employee relationship, but it's for the court to examine the substance of each given situation and decide based on the facts whether such a relationship exists. I won't go through the criteria in detail, but especially in the case of informal and fairly remote arrangements, it's hard to prove that this kind of relationship does exist. In Bennell's case, the Judge decided on the available evidence that one didn't, even though Bennell was doing some work for the club's benefit.
We don't have sufficient information to judge for sure, but I think at present that the role of the lawyers must be regarded as open to question. City launched the survivors' scheme in March 2019, so over two-and-a-half years ahead of the trial. Costs in civil litigation generally tend to ramp up massively in the run-up to and during trial.
Yes, I'm sure that had they elected not to go forward with Bolt Burdon and had instead made an application under the survivors' scheme, any conditional fee arrangement would have become invalid and the victims would have been liable for the firm's fees for the work it had done until that point. However, it's hard to see that the fees would have been massive at that stage. One suspects that the compensation under the survivors' scheme would have enabled the victims to pay using a relatively small proportion of their proceeds under that scheme.
So the question remains and will continue to remain unless there's a successful appeal: assuming Bolt Burdon advised the claimants that their interests were better served by pursuing the litigation rather than engaging with the scheme, what were the grounds for opining thus? After all, the Judge expounded in detail on the difficulties in proving vicarious liability in the manner that would have been needed for the claims to succeed, so was it really prudent to pursue a course of action reliant on managing to establish such proof?
Of course, maybe something will emerge at some stage to answer that question in the positive. It's a perfectly valid to raise the issue now, though, especially given my understanding (though I stand to be corrected by anyone with authoritative knowledge to the contrary) that, assuming there's a conditional fee arrangement at play here, the victims will have had to pony up for the cost of insurance against paying the defendants' fees should they lose.
As for MES, I missed that on a quick scan through the text last night and have only just seen it. Kudos for being quoted in a High Court trial, though the circumstances of that are obviously desperately sad. I did also notice that Nick Harris gave evidence, however. The seriousness of the subject matter means that, in this post, I won't say everything about this fact that I otherwise would, but I note the court refused to accept him as an expert witness - meaning the Judge decided with impeccable sagacity that he wasn't interested in Harris's opinions.
Finally, my heart does go out to the victims. They've suffered horrendously and in a way that's totally unimaginable for someone like me, who's never been exposed to anything even remotely comparable, and they must be devastated by this outcome. But at the moment, fuelled by interviews with a solicitor who's just run a case that lost comprehensively, it seems to me that the blame is being channeled in a direction that doesn't seem altogether justified based on the publicly available facts.
