Hodge Jones & Allen

Hodge Jones & Allen was founded in 1977 as a community based legal practice in Camden, London. More than 30 years on, the firm remains committed to providing first-class legal help to individuals and organisations, either as private clients or with the assistance of public funding, across a number of disciplines.

Our philosophy has always been to enable individuals to have access to justice where otherwise they might be denied it.

A history in the headlines

We have been involved in a series of cutting-edge legal actions which have made headlines and advanced the law.

In the area of complex group actions we were one of the firms that represented the victims of the King’s Cross fire in 1987 which claimed the lives of 31 people and  the Marchioness ferry disaster where 30 people lost their lives; we represented the families committee at the inquest into the New Cross house fire where nine people died and 20 were injured in 1980.

We have led the way in complex product liability cases and are currently acting for a small number of families of paraplegic and brain-damaged children suing the makers of the MMR vaccine.

The firm has a proven track record of establishing human rights or  fighting on behalf of victims of miscarriages of justice. We acted for Winston Silcott, wrongly convicted of killing PC Blakelock in the Broadwater farm riots and the Bridgewater Four, the men wrongly accused of murdering the newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater.

We established in the case of Secretary of State for Defence v Catherine Smith and HM Coroner for Oxford (Court of Appeal 18.5.09) Smith, that members of the armed forces on military service abroad have the benefits of  the rights guaranteed by the Human Rights Act 1998 (‘the HRA’) whether or not they are on a British military base or in a British hospital.

A future with a vision

In April 2007, the office moved from under the railway bridge on Camden Road into a brand-new, state of the art office block on North Gower Street. There are now 170 staff, including 90 lawyers practising in over nine distinct areas of law.