The recent cases of Denness v East Hampshire District Council and Robbins v London Borough of Bexley have shed further light where property damage is alleged to have been caused by the roots of adjacent trees.
Both property and tree owners will be affected by these decisions as the long-held view that liability is always established merely by the proximity of trees to buildings built on shrinkable soils may well be confined to history. Continue reading
Sadly, there is some litigation that is very hard to settle. Some claimants are not very realistic about what their claim is worth or about whether they will recover their legal costs. Equally, some claimants are badly advised by either their lawyers or their experts about their prospects of success and how much they might recover.
If you are a defendant facing these sorts of claimants, how should you try to deal with it? The courts much prefer it when parties try to settle their disputes. While it is difficult to make offers to settle when the parties are a long way apart on the value of the claim, the courts do expect the parties to try nonetheless.
Expert evidence is pivotal in most construction and engineering disputes. This means that, as lawyers, we need to be on top of our game when it comes to expert evidence.
Most of us probably think that we are very good at managing the expert-lawyer relationship. However, the fact that expert evidence keeps coming in for robust comment in the TCC should be a lesson to us all. Continue reading
I recently blogged on Ampleforth Abbey Trust v Turner & Townsend Project Management Ltd and how the court in that case held that the liability cap in the project manager’s standard terms did not pass the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977’s (UCTA) test of reasonableness.
RIBA’s recent announcement that it is about to release a 2012 version of its standard form consultancy agreements spurred me to think some more. How vulnerable to challenge under UCTA are terms excluding or limiting liability in standard form appointments, such as those produced by RIBA, RICS and ACE? Continue reading
In Stannard (t/a Wyvern Tyres) v Gore, the Court of Appeal held that there is no special modification of the rule under Rylands v Fletcher for cases involving the escape of fire. It is an essential requirement of this rule that the “dangerous thing” brought onto the defendant’s land should escape. In so-called fire cases, where fire escapes but the “dangerous thing” does not, the defendant will not be liable under Rylands v Fletcher, notwithstanding that the “dangerous thing” may have played a role in the start or spread of the fire.
Alliancing seems to be back in vogue. While it has always been in use in the UK over the last fifteen or so years, it has never really made it to the mainstream in quite the same way that it has in other jurisdictions. For example, in Australia, alliancing accounts for one third of public spending on infrastructure and is used on colossal new build projects in the water, road and rail sectors – including several worth over a billion Aussie dollars. To put it into context on a pound-for-pound basis, that’s like the UK government using alliancing for projects to the value of the whole of the 2012 Olympics infrastructure spend, every year.
This blog post looks at liability caps in professional appointments following Ampleforth Abbey Trust v Turner & Townsend Project Management Ltd (last week we considered letters of intent in light of the same case). In Ampleforth, the project manager’s appointment contained a provision that limited its liability under the appointment. HHJ Keyser QC had to decide whether this provision was enforceable. He had little difficulty in deciding that it wasn’t.
I think most people (including professional consultants) will agree with his decision on the facts, but is the judge’s reasoning as robust as it looks, and is the decision of wider application? Perhaps not, on either count. Continue reading
Sorry, there is no such app (yet) but we can’t be far off since Money Claims Online does very much the same job. It may sound like a dodgy ambulance-chasing outfit but it is a legitimate service provided by HM Court Service.
Letters of intent on construction projects are often condemned as a Bad Thing and to be avoided at all costs. They are particularly prevalent in the construction industry and can create all sorts of problems for both the contractor and the employer. However, this is not to say that using a letter of intent is always flawed.
The judgment in Allen Fabrications Ltd v ASD Ltd discusses the use and reasonableness of limitation and exclusion clauses in downstream supply contracts. Given the number of supply contracts in the construction industry, this is an important decision for those who produce parts that are then used to manufacture products, and who use such clauses to allocate risk.
