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Caught in the middle

25 May 2018 / Ben Amunwa
Issue: 7794 / Categories: Features , Procedure & practice
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Game playing should be avoided if civil litigators learn of opponents’ mistakes while trying to serve clients’ interests. Benjamin Amunwa reports.

  • The High Court has held that parties to a litigation may be under a duty to correct their opponent’s mistakes or misunderstandings if doing so furthers the overriding objective.

Woodward and Addison v Phoenix Healthcare Distribution Ltd [2018] EWHC 334 (Ch) was a contractual claim worth over £5m, brought by the assignees of two insolvent companies.

The contract was made on 20 June 2011 for the purchase of a drug. The claimants alleged that Phoenix had sold them the product as a generic drug, in breach of an existing patent to Pfizer.

As the alleged breach and/or misrepresentation had occurred at the time the contract was entered into, the claim was due to be time barred on 20 June 2017. The claimants issued the claim form on the eve of limitation (19 June 2017) and the usual rule (CPR 7.5(1)) required them to serve the claim form on the defendant within four

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DWF—19 appointments

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Belfast team bolstered by three senior hires and 16 further appointments

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Knights—Ella Dodgson & Rebecca Laffan

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Double hire marks launch of family team in Leeds

NEWS
Charlie Mercer and Astrid Gillam of Stewarts crunch the numbers on civil fraud claims in the English courts, in this week's NLJ. New data shows civil fraud claims rising steadily since 2014, with the King’s Bench Division overtaking the Commercial Court as the forum of choice for lower-value disputes
Bea Rossetto of the National Pro Bono Centre makes the case for ‘General Practice Pro Bono’—using core legal skills to deliver life-changing support, without the need for niche expertise—in this week's NLJ
The Supreme Court issued a landmark judgment in July that overturned the convictions of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, once poster boys of the Libor and Euribor scandal. In NLJ this week, Neil Swift of Peters & Peters considers what the ruling means for financial law enforcement
Small law firms want to embrace technology but feel lost in a maze of jargon, costs and compliance fears, writes Aisling O’Connell of the Solicitors Regulation Authority in this week's NLJ
Charles Pigott of Mills & Reeve reports on Haynes v Thomson, the first judicial application of the Supreme Court’s For Women Scotland ruling in a discrimination claim, in this week's NLJ
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