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PI Brief Update

Trial and Error: James v Ireland [2015] EWHC 1259 (QB) - Sarah Hunt, John M Hayes

28/06/15. Mr James, the Defendant in a road traffic accident claim, appealed the Judgment and Order of Master Campbell on 7 August 2014. Master Campbell held that for the purpose of CPR 45.16 and 45.17 the trial of the action had commenced and accordingly a 100% success fee applied. This was by no means an unsubstantial case and the success fee claimed was around the £320,000 mark. The appeal was successful and Mrs Justice Slade DBE overturned that decision, reducing the uplift to the fixed 12.5%.

The Relevant CPR

The former CPR 45.15(6) provides inter alia that:

(b) a reference to ‘trial’ is a reference to the final contested hearing or to the contested hearing of any issue ordered to be tried separately;

(c) a reference to a claim concluding at trial is a reference to a claim concluding by settlement after the trial has commenced or by Judgment.

The silence of the practice direction supplementing the former CPR 45 in relation to CPR 45.15(6) suggests that...

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All information on this site was believed to be correct by the relevant authors at the time of writing. All content is for information purposes only and is not intended as legal advice. No liability is accepted by either the publisher or the author(s) for any errors or omissions (whether negligent or not) that it may contain. 

The opinions expressed in the articles are the authors' own, not those of Law Brief Publishing Ltd, and are not necessarily commensurate with general legal or medico-legal expert consensus of opinion and/or literature. Any medical content is not exhaustive but at a level for the non-medical reader to understand. 

Professional advice should always be obtained before applying any information to particular circumstances.

Excerpts from judgments and statutes are Crown copyright. Any Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of OPSI and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland under the Open Government Licence.