Gypsy and traveller encampments are not universally popular, not least because of the impact that they can have on neighbouring homeowners. However, one High Court case strikingly showed that, with the right legal advice, resistance to such developments can succeed. A local authority granted planning permission for four caravan pitches in the open countryside. A...

Written contracts can be varied orally post signature unless they specifically state to the contrary. In one case which illustrated the point, a property landlord was found by the Court of Appeal to have wrongfully excluded a tenant who was in rent arrears, having earlier orally agreed to stay its hand. The tenant, who was about £12,000 in arrears of licence...

In a stern warning to every worker that breaching your employers’ confidence can have the gravest consequences, a recruitment consultant who leaked information to competitors ended up on the losing side of a full-blown High Court libel trial. The man, in his 20s, was sacked by a recruitment firm after his illicit activities were discovered and, shortly...

The trouble with oral contracts is that disputes arising from them generally hinge on one person’s word against another’s. That was certainly so in one case in which an alleged conversation between a woman and a Saudi Arabian prince in a hotel lobby triggered years of enormously expensive litigation. The woman claimed to have been the only true wife of the...

Many large companies do not directly employ their staff, instead relying on outsourcing. However, an Appeal Court ruling has shown that that does not necessarily relieve them of legal liabilities that may arise from the now ubiquitous deficits in employee pension schemes. Companies A and B were in the same ownership. The former provided services to the latter by...