GLOBAL CLAIMS – THE DANGERS INVOLVED

John Doyle Construction Ltd v Laing Management (Scotland) Ltd, unreported, Outer House of the Court of Session, 18 April 2002

In John Doyle Construction Ltd v Laing Management (Scotland) Ltd, unreported, Outer House of the Court of Session, 18 April 2002, Lord Macfadyen held that a global claim for loss and expense must fail if any material contribution to the causation of the global loss is made by a factor or factors for which the defender bears no legal liability. However this rule is tempered in its application by two considerations. The first is that it does not follow inevitably from the failure of the global claim that the claim as a whole will fail: it may still be possible to attribute individual sums of loss or expense to individual causative events. The second is that causation must be treated as a common sense matter. That said, Lord Macfadyen was careful to point out the dangers inherent in bringing a global claim. Not only is there a risk that the global claim will fail but there is also the risk that the claim to recover on the basis of individual causative events will fail if there is no sufficient evidential basis in the pleadings for such individual claims.