The legal firm of Irwin Mitchell covers a wide range of law. In fact, many of the areas in which they are experts can be difficult to find competent solicitors in. One of these would be handling claims involving either illness or accidents that occur while on a cruise. Irwin Mitchell’s lawyers are competent at dealing with these types of claims. They have worked on the behalf of numerous clients dealing with claims that occurred on various ships across the globe. Some cases are individual claims while others have been group action lawsuits. Whatever the claim, Irwin Mitchell is well equipped to handle it effectively and professionally.
If you find yourself in a situation where you have contracted an illness or received an injury as result of a cruise, you may be entitled to compensation. To know for sure, a consultation with a lawyer at Irwin Mitchell can answer many of your questions. Irwin Mitchell makes it easy to contact them. Their website features an online claim form that can easily be completed and submitted to Irwin Mitchell. If you think you might be entitled to making such a claim remember that time is of the essence. A claim must be made within two years from disembarking from the cruise. If the cruise did not enter international waters, then the time period is much more restrictive.
For many of these types of cases, the damages that are awarded can be quite significant. In fact, some of the judgments on previous cases won by Irwin Mitchell have involved damages in excess of a million pounds. One example of a case won by Irwin Mitchell involved salmonella food poisoning. Passengers who suffered from the food poisoning received over a quarter of a million pounds. Other successful claims involved Guardia and E Coli that were contracted while onboard a cruise ship.
If you are looking for more generic accident claims in Bristol then Irwin Mitchell also covers this. If you want to know more, visit www.irwinmitchell.com.
Tags: Irwin Mitchell, personal injury
Posted December 21st, 2011 in Uncategorized |
Britain’s roads – to deteriorate further ?
Hotter summers, colder winters equate to deterioration in road surfaces and this last winter, many potholes suddenly appeared, wreaking havoc with car suspensions, tyres and potentially causing crashes. This has cost Council’s dear at a time when their budgets are being cut back. So how are they responding ?
It appears there will now be a new definition of when a pothole can be considered to be a pothole.
Under new guidelines from the London Borough of Lambeth, set to be copied by many other councils, holes of less than 1.57 inches (40mm) in depth will not be repaired. Under the existing rules the benchmark was depth of over 0.98in (25mm).
Parliamentary research has indicated a massive cost of pothole repairs of £13 billion a year.
Lambeth have also reduced the regularity of their road inspections from every four months to every six months.
Posted May 22nd, 2011 in Uncategorized |
High Court Injunctions farce
Whichever side of the debate about super injunctions, gagging orders, privacy and such like you are on, an important implication of the recent shenanigans is that the authority of injunctions seems to have been diluted. An injunction is a very serious matter and an injunction order is one of the most stringent orders available to a civil judge. Let’s not forget that most injunctions state clearly that if a party subject to the order breaches it, prison will follow.
One of the more bizarre aspects of the recent “outing” of celebrities and business people who have obtained so-called super injunctions is that apparent alliance between followers of twitter and other social networks, generally perhaps associated with the younger generation and residents of the House of lords, often seen as a somewhat staid institution inhabited by the older generation. Together, these on the face of it different worlds seemed to have outflanked the celebrities and to an extent the court.
All in all very interesting, but don’t forget that an injunction remains a very powerful litigation weapon and a serious issue. If you are served with an injunction, whether directly or indirectly involved ion a case, take legal advice and be sure to fully comply.
Posted May 20th, 2011 in Uncategorized |
Ensuring that your company records are updated is not always highest on the agenda for businesses trying to survive and grow but statutory compliance is nonetheless important as is shown by what can happen if the statutory books up-to-date if there is a share transfer but the new owner’s name is not entered into the register of members.
The problem is that under the Companies Act 2006, except in very limited circumstances, the person shown as a member in the register of members is a member and a person not shown isn’t – until the register is rectified.
This can have practical effects such as making notices of meetings invalid, invalidating votes of shareholders and so on and can affect, as it did in a recent case in the Supreme Court, whether or not one retains the rights attaching to shares transferred for financial purposes into the names of nominees.
Contact us for advice on company secretarial and company law matters.
Posted May 17th, 2011 in General |
The number of businesses in the UK which are suffering from ‘significant’ or ‘critical’ financial problems on the first quarter of 2011 has risen to 186,000, according to a report by insolvency specialists Begbies Traynor. This is an increase of 26 per cent over the figure for the third quarter of 2010 and is 15 per cent more than the same quarter in 2010.
Another report shows a 4 per cent jump in the number of retail businesses at ‘high risk’ of insolvency and there has also been a 15 per cent increase in the number of retails using company voluntary arrangements compared with 2010.A
report by accountants PwC also revealed an increase of more than 12 per cent in corporate insolvencies with retailing the worst-hit sector.
Things are tough in retailing and the building industry was recently identified as having had a particularly bad winter.
For advice on managing your trade risk, contact us.
Posted May 16th, 2011 in General |
There has, since its inception, been a great deal of confusion regarding the ‘double Inheritance Tax (IHT) nil rate band’ legislation – whereby the unused proportion of the IHT nil rate band of the first of a couple to die is passed to the second: this is termed the ‘transferable nil rate band’ (TRNB).
One of the problems stems from those cases in which the estate of the first deceased merely passed across to their spouse and the formal documentation relating to the estate was either not prepared or not retained.
HM Revenue and Customs have attempted to make the use of the TRNB simpler by issuing a new code of practice which allows an estate making use of a transferred TRNB to be an ‘excepted estate’ provided certain conditions are met.
In practice, this will simplify the administration of many estates. However, there are still conditions which may cause difficulties for many people, such as the conditions that the first deceased must have:
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been domiciled for IHT purposes in the UK at the date of death; and
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not have owned foreign assets (i.e. a holiday home) worth more than £100,000 at the date of death.
The guidance can be found at
Posted May 13th, 2011 in General |
Wikipedia and freedom of speech
Freedom of speech, injunctions, rights to privacy… all of these are “hot topics” at the moment. It’s not only twitter, facebook and the social media sites that are being looked at. We may all agree that Wikipedia is a fantastic and valuable resource, bit even Wikipedia is being looked at regarding internet freedom of speech. This week Louis Bacon, a billionaire US hedge fund manager, was given permission by the High Court in London to force three sites, including the online encyclopaedia, to disclose the identities of online commentators alleged to have defamed him. There are jurisdictional issues with this case, as if they are abroad, they may not be subject to the High Court Order. This issue needs to be looked at urgently, as it is creating a huge amount of confusion and uncertainty, let alone copy !
Tags: litigation, privacy law, solicitors in bristol
Posted May 13th, 2011 in Civil Litigation, Commercial Litigation, Legal News |
Not many prosecutions are brought under the Consumer Protection From Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, which are designed to protect consumers form the activities of unscrupulous traders.
Recently several companies were taken to court by the Office of Fair Trading for breaches of the regulations.
One of the companies offered invitations to claim ‘prizes’ by sending unsolicited letters to people. The ‘prizes’ which were the subject of the prosecution were either an LCD TV (allocated to less than 1 per cent of the applicants) or a ‘Zurich watch’ which was allocated to more than 99 per cent of the respondents. The Zurich watch actually contained a movement made in Japan.
To obtain the prize, it was necessary to obtain a ‘prize code’. This was done by the ‘prize’ recipient telephoning a premium-rate number – which cost £8.95. They then had to send a further £8.50 because the watch was an ‘electrical item’. The total cost to the consumer was therefore £17.45 and the supplier made a profit of approximately £7 on each ‘prize’.
The court concluded that there was in reality, no prize: the claimant had bought the watch.
In each case, the OFT found that the Regulations had been breached and that the ‘prize’ element of the promotion was a sham.
There are many unscrupulous traders in the market and promotions that offer ‘free prizes’ are seldom genuine. There are also examples of companies that target vulnerable people (i.e. the recently bereaved).
If something looks too good to be true, it is almost certainly because it is. Do not commit yourself without thinking through your options.
Posted May 12th, 2011 in General |
The laws against corrupt practice in the USA are both strong and pervasive, as a recent case illustrates.
It involved a London solicitor who is a US citizen and who was charged in the USA in connection with corrupt practices with regard to contracts worth more than £4 billion that had been awarded in Nigeria to a consortium represented by the solicitor. He paid bribes to high-ranking Nigerian officials between 1996 and 2004.
He fought extradition to the USA on the grounds that the time-lag between the offences and the case coming to trial prevented a fair trial and that the offences were too distant from the US for the courts there to have authority.
Despite that fact that only one of the member firms of the consortium was American, he was extradited to the USA and negotiated a plea bargain with the US authorities. This involved him agreeing to forfeit nearly $150 million.
He is scheduled for sentencing in June and could face a maximum prison sentence of five years for each of to two offences.
Posted May 12th, 2011 in General |
The new ‘mediation first’ rule applicable to divorce and separation have been well publicised, but moves to make the process more jargon-free have not received much attention.
The following changes have been made which will, it is hoped, help the participants in family proceedings better understand the process.
Old legal term New legal term
Ancillary relief Financial order
Divorce decree Matrimonial orders
People without mental capacity Protected parties
Guardian ad litem Children’s guardian
Next friend Litigation friend
Posted May 11th, 2011 in Family, General |
