Published Friday, 23 October 2009
Manmohan 'Johnny' Sandhu, 44, was jailed earlier this year after his interviews with clients inside a police station were secretly recorded.
The lawyer, formerly of Colby Avenue, Londonderry, pleaded guilty to incitement to murder and four charges of attempting to pervert the course of justice.
He is now set to contest the severity of the sentence imposed at a hearing set for December.
Judges in the Court of Appeal also ordered transcripts of defence pleas made during the original trial be disclosed to his legal team.
Sandhu, who practised out of offices in Limavady, was arrested in January 2006 after police taped his conversations with suspected terrorist clients at the Serious Crime Suite in Antrim.
The charges against him arose from the attempted assassination of a taxi driver and two killings during a power struggle between the UVF and rival LVF in 2005.
As well as incitement to murder, he was accused of attempting to pervert the course of justice over the UVF murders of Jameson Lockhart and Andrew Cully.
A court was told that Sandhu incited members of the UVF to murder the taxi driver as he recovered in hospital in August 2005 from a failed attempt on his life.
Prosecuters said Sandhu phoned an unknown person from Antrim police station and indicated that this man "should be taken out".
In another bugged conversation Sandhu was overheard coaching a client who was accused of killing Mr Lockhart.
The murder victim was shot as he sat in a lorry on the Lower Newtownards Road in Belfast in July 2005.
Sandhu told his client how to explain how gloves with cartridge discharge residue came to be seized from his house.
According to transcripts read Sandhu first suggested he had joined a rifle club, and then to say that they belonged to murdered UDA boss Jim Gray.
Police used powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to record the conversations between the solictor and his clients.
It was the first such conviction of a lawyer in Northern Ireland, with the trial judge telling him in June: "It was a wicked thing to incite men of violence to murder an innocent man. This was all the more so when you were a solicitor."