Civil way: 27 October 2017

The law is getting more colourful. Books of constant green, white, brown and red respectively are devoted to practice and procedure. At a Glance changes its cover colour with each annual edition so that at the next editorial meeting to write the jokes for the 201920 publication they may decide to go naked which should be a laugh. The Judicial College has now got in on the colour act. The 14th edition of its Guidelines for the Assessment of General Damages in Personal Injury Cases just published by Oxford University Press is adorned with an orange cover. If you deal with these cases then you are likely to attract a negligence claim absent acquisition of this latest edition or theft of a colleague’s copy.

The guideline figures have been adjusted to reflect the RPI increase of 4.8% in the two years up to 31 May 2017. Having previously flirted with the idea, the differentiation between awards for scarring by reference to gender—‘an outdated stereotype’—has