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Professional negligence
Recovering from negligent professionals to put right the damage caused to businesses, whether large companies or smaller enterprises, has been at the heart of our commercial litigation practice for over 20 years.
We work with you to decide on the optimum strategy to resolve the issue, balancing the cost to your business (both internally and its legal spend) with the commercial outcome that you want to achieve. Our focus is on project management to include early dispute avoidance and alternative dispute resolution. We try to help our clients find an alternative and/or avoid, if possible, what could be time consuming and costly litigation.
If a court claim cannot be avoided then we are well resourced to handle all types of professional negligence claim, even the most complex and document heavy.
Funding
Some litigants apply for litigation funding to pay their legal costs because without it they would not be able to afford to pursue an action at all. But this is not the only situation in which litigants seek to use litigation funding.
Businesses no longer need to invest and risk their own capital to fund a legal claim. FISCUS is the funding package that we can offer clients to help manage the financial risk of litigation and move those costs off your balance sheet.
Find out more about litigation funding options available to you.
Our expertise
The definition of professional negligence is “a subset of the general rules on negligence to cover the situation in which the defendant has represented him or herself as having more than average skills and abilities".
Our experience
Our team of over 15 professional negligence lawyers has recently handled the following types of claim:
- Recovering circ. £1m for a property development company whose option agreement was negligently drafted by their solicitor.
- Claiming £7m for a company against its broker when its insurer failed to pay on a significant fire loss.
- Several recent claims have been made against accountants who provided negligent advice to businesses on issues such as Employee Benefit Trusts, retirement relief and holdover relief.
- Correcting title defects for another property developer when a property acquired was not compliant with planning permission. We currently have a number of claims of this type in the context of negligence by surveyors and solicitors.
- Another similar case in which we needed to correct an access issue for a lender on a high value property, arising out of solicitor negligence.
- Numerous claims are underway relating to financial advisers who failed to advise properly in relation to Advance Payment Notices.
- Recovering from solicitors where lease break clauses on business premises were not activated on time in accordance with instructions.
Case studies
Our client, a care home operator, came to us when they were told that they had no insurance for a number of personal injury claims that had been made by their customers and residents.
Read case study
We act for the owners of a manufacturing company that suffered a catastrophic fire in one of its installations at the factory.
Read case studyWe can offer arrangements for price certainty to allow you to budget accurately. We can manage the entire dispute or just take on a specific aspect such as a disclosure exercise, depending on what resource you already have in place and how you want to manage the issue.
Funding
We can offer arrangements for price certainty to allow you to budget accurately. We can manage the entire dispute or just take on a specific aspect such as a disclosure exercise, depending on what resource you already have in place and how you want to manage the issue.
If the prospects of a claim are strong enough, we can work with you to seek to find a suitable funding arrangement to assist you in managing the costs of litigation. Our litigation finance and insurance solution FISCUS provides further information on the various funding options that may be available to you.
"A strong commercial team frequently instructed in very high value disputes in High Court commercial centres."
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