A recent case in which the owners of a farm faced ruin because their property was saddled with an ancient responsibility to maintain the local church received a great deal of publicity, and has prompted a change in the applicable…
When an agricultural equipment manufacturer found that another company had registered a Community Trade Mark (CTM) that was similar to one of its own brand names, it opposed the registration, arguing that the company that had registered it had only…
The Court of Appeal recently ruled in a case which asked whether fatherhood is sufficient to warrant contact with a child and decided that the answer is ‘no’. The case was unusual. It involved a married couple who wanted to…
In 2009, the Government and the Association of British Insurers entered into an agreement, the Statement of Principles on the Provision of Flood Insurance, which committed home insurance providers to making flood insurance as widely available as possible. This agreement…
Businesses with subsidiaries should be notified of the first reported case in which a parent company was found liable to an employee of its subsidiary on tort law principles. The Court of Appeal held that the parent company owed a…
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) have published new guidance intended to help personal service companies determine their correct employment status. HMRC will take a risk-based approach to consider how likely it is that they need to check whether IR35 applies…
A recent case dealt with the vexed question of how similar one’s advertising can be to the trade marks of another company before this constitutes an infringement of its intellectual property rights. When supermarket giant ASDA sought to break into…
A Northern Irish company has been prosecuted under the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 (Corporate Manslaughter Act 2007) and fined £187,500, plus £13,000 costs, over the death of an employee. The employee was killed after being hit by…
In a recent case an employer dismissed a senior employee due to a breakdown in the working relationship with a payment in lieu of notice. It was then discovered that the employer could have dismissed the employee for gross misconduct…
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has fined Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust £325,000 following a serious breach of the Data Protection Act 1998. The fine related to the discovery of highly sensitive personal data belonging to tens of…
