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PIBULJ

Practical Periodical Payments - Bill Braithwaite QC, Head of Exchange Chambers

22/10/12. Since 2005, courts have had the power to make periodical payments orders, but some of the complications are only slowly coming to the surface. Here are a few practical points.  1) The claimant has to decide which form of order he or she would prefer, (which will almost certainly require a mixture of legal and financial advice). Similarly, the defendant has to decide which form of compensation would be preferable from its point of view. If the parties cannot agree, the Court has to decide. That can raise a major stumbling block; the obvious example is when...

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Mediation and ADR: What the Other Side Is Thinking and Reading About - Tim Wallis, Trust Mediation Ltd

19/10/12. Love it or loathe it, the role of mediation continues to increase. The judiciary continues to encourage parties to mediate and the case law on costs sanctions gives a powerful lever to anyone who wants to ensure that the others side takes mediation seriously.Myy role as a personal injury mediator allows me to have a foot in each of the “camps” in the personal injury sector, and I thought it would be interesting to looks at what the insurers that personal injury practitioners deal with are thinking and reading about mediation.

Insurers are making greater use of mediation. CEDR’s “Fifth Mediation Audit” reported that 15% more cases had been mediated in 2011 than the previous year and that 20% of cases involved an insurance...

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Editorial: Recent Developments - Adian Ellis, Temple Garden Chambers

18/10/12. It has been a busy month in the Courts, with a number of significant developments in relation to cases that have previously been discussed in this journal. First, it did not take long following Summers v Fairclough Homes Ltd for County Courts to start striking claims out for abuse of process. In Fari v Homes of Haringey (HHJ Mitchell, Central London County Court, 9 October 2012), the Claimant had pleaded losses exceeding £740,000 including...

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Ill blows the wind.... - Helen Tinkler, BPP & Central Law Training

18/10/12. There has been a warm welcome from certain quarters for the judgment handed down last week (10 October) in Simmons v Castle [2012] EWCA Civ 1288. You haven't heard? The one in which the judges decided that for those claimants funding their claims with a CFA entered into before 1 April 2013, April will, indeed, be the cruellest month as they will not reap a 10% hike in their general damages by virtue of having sown the seeds of their CFA before 1 April 2013? Yes, that judgment, which revisited the earlier, July, episode in the saga of the implementation of the LASPO recommendations.

The ABI, or first interested party (but behind them ranked every insurer up and down the land), tapping into the initial premise that the primary purpose of the 10% increase in general damages was to compensate successful claimants for the loss of the right to recover the success fee from the defendant, successfully argued that it was illogical and unfair on defendants if the increase would be enjoyed by successful CFA claimants who, because of the wording of...

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Fraud Doth Never Prosper: Evidence of Fraud Obtained After Trial or Settlement - Pankaj Madan, Exchange Chambers & 12KBW

18/10/12. Sophocles wrote "Things gained through unjust fraud are never secure". More recent history in the Personal Injury area of law have shown him to be quite right. Headlines such as "£3 million crash man is "fit as a fiddler" are press grabbing headlines which stir the emotions of hard working, decent and honest people, sell newspapers and make the blood boil of genuine victims of personal injury. I hasten to add that the headline was as it happens entirely unjustified, at least according to the Judgment of the High Court.

It cannot have escaped people's attention that the tide appears to have turned against Personal Injury victims generally. I act equally for Claimants and Defendant Insurance Companies, without fear or favour to either. But whether you act only for insurance companies and Defendants or only for Claimants it is vitally important to understand what is happening and to ensure that...

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