In David Abbott and 3,449 others v Ministry of Defence, Master Davison considered the extent to which multiple claimants can use a single claim form.
REUTERS | Yuriko Nakao
November 7, 2022
The right to issue multiple claims using a single claim form
REUTERS | Lisi Niesner
November 2, 2022
Costs Law Reports Conference 2022: post event review
On 28 September 2022, the Costs Law Reports (CLR) held its 10th annual Costs Conference. For the second year running, the Conference took place in the plush and modern Ashworth Centre at Lincoln’s Inn with over 100 delegates in attendance. Happily, the Conference was well received, with many feedback forms giving a clean sweep of “excellent” for the venue, the speakers and the topics chosen.
REUTERS | Hannibal Hanschke
October 31, 2022
Arbitraging the time value of litigation
Nothing ever moves quickly in litigation. Of course, it’s complex, technical and necessarily procedural with challenging timetabling demands placed on the judiciary but there are other factors too. Legal services rely on monetising time through hourly rates that discourages efficiency. Other times, the judiciary can be slow on its own admission, for example in Bilta v Natwest Markets plc, where the Court of Appeal described the 19 months taken to hand down the first instance judgment as “inexcusable” as a result of which a re-trial has been ordered.
Businesses involved in litigation may bemoan the general snail’s pace of litigation and the resulting untold costs but successful commercial entities are also nimble and savvy enough to take advantage by arbitraging this time to create value and profit through what is effectively a corporatised form of “receive now and pay later”, or in layman’s terms, “do wrong and receive the benefits now, and worry about paying the consequences of it later”.
This is the arbitraging of the time value of litigation, a concept which everyone understands in the abstract but which this piece illustrates in mathematical terms using the same principles of the time value of money.
