Practical Law

I don’t know if Mackay is to Scottish names what Smith is to English names, Jones is to Welsh names and Molloy is to Irish names, but it seems to have featured fairly regularly in the posts on this blog over the last year or so.

It was in July last year that we had Akenhead J’s seminal judgment in Walter Lilly v Mackay, which I discussed at the time. More recently, Jonathan considered Lord Malcolm’s judgment in the whisky distillery case, White and Mackay v Blyth & Blyth (same name, significantly different facts). It’s not just us either, as Alastair Walls has also considered both judgments and, more recently, James Ladner referred to prolongation claims. Continue reading →

So, after many months of waiting we’ve finally got the news we had been waiting for: it’s a boy or, as one tabloid newspaper put it, “The Regal has landed”. The media has whipped the public into a frenzy and created Royal baby hysteria.

Similar hysteria sometimes results in the construction law world when significant case law is published. Some of the hysteria is warranted due to the significance of the case, for example Walter Lilly v Mackay, and some of isn’t, for example PC Harrington v Systech International. After the latter case was published, some commentators created a false hysteria claiming that “…adjudicators are no longer entitled to their fees if they issue unenforceable decisions…”. However, on reading the case that was clearly wrong and the impact of the case was much more limited, as I said in my blog at the time, and now confirmed by Ramsey J in Wilmott Dixon v Newlon (see paragraph 79). Continue reading →

It was Paul Daniels who made the phrase, “You’ll like this… not a lot, but you’ll like it” famous. Perhaps that would have been apt last week when the IMF revised its 2013 growth forecast for the UK from 0.7% to 0.9%. Not great, but it’s a start.

However, there is no doubt that it will be a long road to recovery and we will still see the effects of the recession for some years to come. I’m not an insolvency expert, but I realised the other day that insolvency is a factor in much of my current workload. For example, I’m acting as adjudicator where one party is in financial difficulties, acting as expert in matters where developers have gone pop, and so on. MCMS is even acting as PQS where the previous PQS succumbed to its heavy financial burdens.

Insolvency is never far from the law reports either. In fact, Ramsey J had to deal with some interesting insolvency points in the adjudication enforcement case, FG Skerritt v Caledonian Building Systems. Continue reading →

It sometimes feels like issues in case law are a bit like buses. You don’t see one for ages and then several come along all together. I got that feeling recently when I read the judgments in Westshield v Buckingham and FG Skerritt v Caledonian Building Systems. For very different reasons, in both cases the court enforced the adjudicator’s decision and rejected the stay of execution sought by the paying party under that decision.

Aside from the stay of execution point (which failed, Buckingham was ordered to be pay the amount found to be due by the first adjudicator), I thought the judgment in Westshield v Buckingham threw up a number of other interesting issues. Continue reading →