PI Brief Update

TechnicalPoint

Today I was instructed by an insurance company to go and kick out a claim against some builders who had accidentally burnt down a house in which they had been working.  Despite the fact that the builders’ insurers had accepted responsibility, today they wanted to get out of paying a single penny simply due to the fact that the homeowner’s solicitors had delivered the claim form half a day out of time.  The other side argued that if the solicitors had been negligent then the claimant would have a remedy against them.  The judge agreed and kicked out the case.

Which about sums up much of this crazy legal system of ours.  The people responsible get off and both side’s lawyers will get paid by insurers.  It’ll then go off to be litigated in an even more complicated and technical professional negligence action in which two more sets of lawyers will profit.  Several years after the damage was caused, the homeowner might get to see a small amount of compensation.  Well, maybe.

Worst of all, I could see my opponent today delighting in the technical point he was succeeding on.  Just when is it, I wondered, when someone suddenly changes and becomes a lawyer?  When they start taking pleasure in diverting justice away from the people it is ostensibly there to serve by raising some clever, weedly, finickity little point which other than lining the pockets of even more lawyers  serves only to add to the sum of human misery in the world?

Whenever it is, it happens just as surely as legal cats becoming very fat.

BabyBarista is a fictional account of a junior barrister written by Tim Kevan. You can buy the latest BabyBarista novel, 'Law and Peace' on Amazon. The cartoons are by Alex Williams, author of The Queen's Counsel Lawyer's Omnibus.