Nathan Talbott, Head of Commercial Litigation, and specialising in complex financial, tax and corporate disputes, dissects the recent report by the Committee of Public Accounts on the state of our tax system, and shares his thoughts on what HMRC needs to do to rebuild public trust.
Mediation is a well known tool amongst those familiar with disputes. It can be very effective in clearing a way to settlement, but it can also sometimes feel like a rather unsophisticated ‘cutting of the cake’, purely to avoid the costs risk of losing at court. There are more subtle alternatives, that might allow the parties to settle but within a framework that more clearly reflects the legal merits - for example, expert determination or early neutral evaluation.
In 2018 Pauline Lomax issued proceedings for reasonable financial provision from the estate of her late husband under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975.
Adjudication and the insolvency process are not always easy companions, based as they are on very different legislation. This can be seen from the following scenario.
We helped a technology supplier with a major software licensing problem.
Generally speaking, courts take robust approach to adjudicators' decisions and tend to rubber stamp the vast majority when a successful party in an adjudication applies for a court order validating the adjudicator’s decision.
Small and Medium Enterprises (‘SMEs’) are now able to complain to the Financial Ombudsman service about financial services.
The question supposes that arbitration is sick. In the case of Domestic English Arbitration, it has been ailing for some time. The Arbitration 1996 (“the Act”) is a good statute. It was meant to cure arbitration in England and Wales. It didn’t.
The general principle is that a trustee has a basic right to be indemnified out of the trust fund for expense or liabilities properly incurred on behalf of the trust.
We helped a technology provider to turn around a substantially delayed implementation of a major data centre / hosting contract.