While the TCC is still open over the summer holidays, it isn’t operating at full bore. The consequential slow down in published cases has given me an opportunity to catch up with some of this year’s non-adjudication cases, and one in particular that caught my eye was Mi-Space v Lend Lease Construction.

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You often know when you start reading a judgment how the case is going to turn out by the way the judge describes the parties’ expert witnesses and witnesses of fact. I got that feeling recently when reading Akenhead J’s judgment in National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside v AEW and PIHL/Galliford Try. Even if the judgment hadn’t mentioned the liability concessions made by the architect and contractor before and during the trial, I’d have known the museum won without having to turn to the end to find out that it had been awarded damages of over £1.1 million.

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A few weeks ago I spent an interesting evening at the Rolls Building taking part in the current consultation on mandatory costs budgeting. The consultation is being chaired by Sir Peter Coulson and, amongst other things, it is considering the desirability of retaining the Admiralty and Commercial Courts’ blanket exception to the mandatory costs budgeting and the current value-based exception for the TCC, the Chancery Division and the Mercantile Courts (claims in excess of £2m are excluded).

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We are all familiar with the principle in English law of precedent and its binding or persuasive nature (depending on where the precedent comes from). We are equally familiar with the court’s ability to distinguish one judgment from another, to not follow previous authority or precedent and to rely on the individual facts to do so. It is well-established that each case will turn on its own facts and it is precisely because of this principle that it is often difficult to predict which party will be the more successful one in any claim that reaches the courts.

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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 →