You may be surprised to hear that if you want to use any legal expenses insurance cover to help you fund a legal case, the insurer cannot force you to use a solicitor of their choice.

When considering bringing a claim there are a number of questions that must be answered, not least whether the defendant is capable of complying with the remedy that is being sought.

A declaration of trust is a legal document that can be used by tenants in common to establish and clarify their respective interests in a property. In a tenants in common arrangement, multiple individuals own a property together, with each person having a distinct share or percentage of ownership.

When a party loses in adjudication, it has to decide whether to comply with the adjudicator’s decision, which often involves paying money to the other side.

One of the grounds for challenging a will is that the deceased did not have the requisite mental capacity when the will was made. Ultimately the focus of the court is to ensure that the will genuinely represents the deceased’s wishes.

A written contract can be in the form of standard terms, which do not need to be signed, or terms which are signed by each party to indicate that they agree those terms. Here we consider a contract that is intended to be signed by the parties but never is.

Solicitors negligence; but would you have done anything different?

There are several reasons a farmer might consider setting up a joint venture: they may need more resource (monetary, machinery or simply more manpower); it might enable an aspiring farmer to get a foot on the farming ladder (which would otherwise be prohibitively expensive); and a JV can help a family farm to navigate a potentially difficult period such as a death in the family.

The claim by Mr and Mrs Brake (Brake v Swift), heard in the High Court in May, to have a cottage and adjacent land revested in them under Section 283A of the Insolvency Act 1986, was set against a background of convoluted litigation extending over a number of years, described by Matthews HHJ as ‘complex’.

It is not easy to be legally excused from performing contractual obligations, but in some circumstances it may be possible.