Riding the caffeine wave

I've just had a week of pretty unpleasant surprises. The three parties in one of my cases scheduled a without prejudice meeting on Tuesday morning at the claimant's solicitors' London office. I set up a telephone conference with the co-defendant's solicitors on the Monday afternoon, with a view to discussing our respective positions and strategy in advance of the meeting. It seemed to go well and I was finalising my preparations on the Monday evening when an email arrived attaching the claimant's costs schedule. Including a success fee and an after-the-event insurance premium their costs are a staggering seven and a half times higher than ours. For a fleeting moment I thought the decimal point may be in the wrong place. It wasn't the best start.

I travelled down to London on the 8am train from Manchester on Tuesday in first class to ensure sufficient space and some peace and quiet. It all went well until Crewe, where a loud and obnoxious businessman boarded the carriage while shouting into his mobile phone, which he continued to do most of the way to London. Some poor fellow named Nick was at the other end of the line, and amid the self-important name drops (which included MI5 and 'the president', although I suspect not of the USA) there was a considerable amount of foul language. I'm not the best at tuning out unwanted noise while trying to focus, and I found myself fervently hoping in a very uncharitable fashion that he would choke on his full fry-up or perhaps the extra slices of toast that he consumed with it, but no.

I arrived for my meeting nice and early but a little out of kilter thanks to the above irritation. My day didn't improve much when during the opening session the co-defendant's solicitor, the same extremely pleasant man with whom I'd had the telephone conference the previous afternoon, announced that his client is on the verge of insolvency. That's not usually such big news in my field as it may sound, as there will ordinarily be an insurance company behind the professional who has been sued, meaning that the claim can still be defended or settled if appropriate. However, in this case the full bombshell was that our co-defendant is also uninsured. Oh.

Near miss

Moving swiftly on, in another matter I had my closest ever swerve from a trial. The case was listed to be heard over four days in Leeds, although it was worth less than £40,000. I kicked off the negotiations to try and settle it and we made fairly decent progress, but, once again, the proportionality of costs caused something of an issue. It was finally settled during telephone negotiations less than two weeks before the trial had been due to start. That should have been the end of it, but incredibly almost another week passed before all parties had signed up to the Tomlin order, which was lodged at court just three working days before the first day of trial. At one point it was suggested that we could use some of the scheduled trial time to ask the judge to iron out the final issues in terms of the agreement that we had reached. That prospect didn't much appeal to me as I felt we would all be given fairly short shrift for wasting court time. Fortunately, several threats to imminently incur counsels' brief fees later, we managed to get there between ourselves.