The Supreme Court will have an unexpected opportunity to review the seminal Mitchell case after another post-Jackson case was given leave to appeal this week. In Thevarajah v Riordan the defendant applied for relief from sanctions after breaching an order relating to disclosure. This was refused and the defendant hired new solicitors, complied with the order and successfully re-applied for relief. The appeal concerns whether the second application should have been rejected.
NLJ columnist, Professor Dominic Regan of City University, says: “This is another decision delivered by Lord Justice Richards, adding yet more to the interpretation of the law.
“Critically, the Appeal Court affirmed Tibbles v SIG [2012] 1 WLR 2591, where the power to vary or revoke an existing order under CPR 3.1(7) was confined to matters where something unexpected arose subsequently or the order was made in ignorance of a critical detail. The measure did not provide an indirect appeal to challenge the order first made. So, an order made and breached would need a CPR 3.9 application to evade the consequences.”
Mitchell v News Group Newspapers [2013] EWCA Civ 1537 became a landmark Jackson reforms case after Andrew Mitchell MP’s solicitors incurred costs sanctions limiting recoverable costs to the court fees after submitting their budget late in his libel action against the publishers of The Sun newspaper.
Mitchell lost his libel case in the High Court last week, after Mr Justice Mitting held that the MP may have called a police officer a “pleb” at the gates of 10 Downing Street.
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