Latest Articles

Property owners are expecting the Government shortly to introduce significant changes to property law. The Queen’s Speech included a proposal for legislation to implement the recent recommendations of the Law Commission (see link to report below). The Commission is the body which makes proposals to the Government on significant changes to the law. The Commission…

The Supreme Court has set out the circumstances in which a local authority must compensate property owners where it forces them to close down their premises. The court has defined for the first time the meaning of ‘default’ for the purposes of section 106 of the Building Act 1984. The decision clarifies when the owner…

There are more and more disputes over wills, new figures show. The number of claims issued in the High Court increased by 10% in 2015 alone. While there have always been challenges to wills from a beneficiary who receives a smaller legacy than expected, or from someone left out of a will entirely, it seems…

The Government and the judiciary have announced that the civil courts are to be automated, with cases put online by 2020. The plan is ‘digitise’ the entire process for money claims, such as for debt or personal injury: from the issue of proceedings to trial, everything will be done online. There are 1.6 million claims…

A residential tenant will often seek to blame their landlord if they are injured by a defect at the property. But where the landlord is not made aware of a potentially dangerous defect that caused injury, the court has recently confirmed that the landlord will not be liable to the tenant. The case involved a…

The courts have been concerned for some time about costs in litigation spiralling ever upwards. The press love to highlight legal cases where costs are many times the damages awarded. The imposition of fixed costs for certain cases in recent years has gone some way to controlling that. The Government has now announced that the…