Compensation Culture gone barmy

Yesterday, I received a piece of SPAM email which read as follows:

"Your client is injured following a slip on a floor.

Your client was possibly inebriated, or running or wearing high heels, the defendants have denied all liability because your claimant didn’t take reasonable care for his own safety.

They also claim that their client has a thorough and monitored cleaning regime.

Usually in these situations you would not proceed as the case is weak.

However if FloorSlip Ltd could prove that the flooring was inherently unsafe and unfit for purpose (by failing to meet HSE guidelines), then we can demonstrate that the defendants have been negligent in their “Duty of Care”.

We impartially test floors to determine if a surface is unsafe using equipment approved by the Health & Safety Executive."

Was it a joke? Apparently not. There are still people out there prepared to advise clients to indulge in absurd speculative litigation. Solicitors whose clients have drunkenly toppled to their doom, or gone skating in high heels. No doubt clients who have been referred by claims management outfits. Maybe the same people who sent me texts telling me I could claim £3,750 in damages following an unnamed member of my family unprovokedly driving our car into a wall.

I do wonder if litigation solicitors would be a load better off if they dumped the crooked intermediaries and undertook less,but higher quality work. This strategy certainly works for those of us in the property field. You get more time to deal with matters properly and are able to use your fees to fund your office rather than someone else's.

Going, going, gone...

After some soul searching, I have decided to dispose of my collection of Home Information Pack Keyrings. That I have such a collection may be a surprise to anyone reading this, but as part of the razzmatazz about this not very much lamented hindrance to Conveyancing in England and Wales, I was sent 100 of them by the Government.

I have managed to lose a few of them, and some have unpleasant marks from having been thrown at pictures of John Prescott, Ruth Kelly and Eric Pickles, but the rest have been listed on eBay under this link here.

To date (31 May) bidding has been brisk, and has settled at 1p. But there is still 5 days to go.

I would hate anyone to lose out on this amazing opportunity to secure a part of our recent legal history, even if one which most people would rather completely forget.

Gherkin Ghoulishness

It appears to be payback time for humanity, and particularly for vegetarians, as a plague of cucumber and other salad vegetable related death stalks Europe. Resisting a call to modify our national fruit and vegetable health message to: "Five-a-day, but this could be your last", the Health Protection Agency has instead limited itself to warning people to wash, peel or cook salad vegetables.

This may be nature's way of saying that veganism really is an evolutionary cul-de-sac, but it is more likely to be another by-product of the unrestrained industrialisation of agriculture.

Our cheap food is of course picked and processed by underpaid and heavily exploited farmworkers, whose conditions of service owe little to any concept of rural bliss.

Help for Criminal Law practitioners

We don't often stray outside our comfort zone of property related law, but recent event (or maybe non-event) (not the Royal Wedding) has given us an idea which may be of help to practitioners of Criminal Law.

It can be hard when seeking to advise someone who is under suspicion of doing away with an acquaintance of whom no trace can be found. To maintain that an alleged victim is alive and well can be difficult, particularly if there is circumstantial evidence against your client.

But if your client is absolutely resolute in their protestations of innocence, and there is not too much blood on their clothes, it is surely right to investigate all possibilities; and one such is that the supposed victim has been raptured.

21 May 2011 was supposed to have been the day that the righteous were gathered up into the fluffy cotton wool environment of heaven, according to eccentric preacher Mr Harold Camping. Although Mr Camping seems to be around still, and has revised his predictions of a global apocalypse to 21 October, as one does; it is by no means impossible that the preacher, who has a website fuilled with intolerant ranting, has not fulfilled all of the requirements of righteousness and so has been left behind, unsaved.

Others, more worthy than Mr Camping or the writer, may of course have gone.

The High Court has ruled that a grapefruit knife is a "knife" (surprising that) and that it may not be sold to minors. This is a proper and excellent decision. A great deal of damage can be done with such things, and indeed it is time that a number of other so-called "kitchen gadgets", which are innocently marketed but have sinister possibilities, were restricted.

I believe that melon scoops are already tightly controlled following a nasty incident in 2008 in Huddersfield, but absolutely no action whatsoever has followed the wholesale abuse of tin openers in fighting between rival gangs in rural Dorset in the summer. We have to stop the spread of these things.

If young people are allowed to get their hands on salad spinners and - heaven forbid - silicone pastry brushes, we will see a wholesale breakdown in law and order. Kitchen shops should be licenced and closed to under 21s, and their window displays obscured with masking tape so as not to tempt youths in with the dubious lure of glamorous weaponry such as pasta machines or cheese domes.

Digital Voice Recognition

Having just invested in some new dictation machines, I was interested to see that they came with a "free" copy of Dragon software.

I thought it might be useful to send a text version of my dictation down with the file, and so, after spending 15 minutes acclimatising my voice to the software, I tried it out on a short tape.

The result:

"At 76 nights at the right answer is that organisms a dumb visit our thoughts needed to attract the is being shown a red Anne and I did not the red on black it is quite clear what of the included the California Corriveau as soon as possible to build onto Borrego Dir jar jar to take 20 September (octagon per amp out by the readers of £7000 as a premium for ham and cheese extension and I get them to do together with our part great show delivery and about whether they can investigate a title and factors in making these emissions middle of the garden as handsets under pounds for the conveyancing and the like back and are reasonably certain that at this stage only copy entries etc and Anne and Anne and November and)

This is the exact opposite is no home preferably within the next fortnight. God frontier for eighth of all that hot brown cities as we e-mail you a revised transfer dedicate some this is not right wing to the photography with the removing to the growth of the transfer do want them to fulfil until it right through no 15th electorate they are total September week we return the documents the last one apologised for not sending them in a last letter. Yours"

It's more James Joyce than Edward Lear, I suppose..

I particularly like the ham and cheese extension - so post-modernist Hänsel und Gretel.

Electoral Lottery Law

So the results are in, but there is something dodgy about them. You don't have to be a mathematical genius to work out that it takes 35,000 Conservative voters to elect one Conservative MP, 33,350 to elect one Labour MP, but 120,000 voters to elect one Liberal Democrat MP. On the votes cast, there should be another 138 Liberal Democrats in Parliament. So where are they all?

The truth is that votes have been stolen by the corrupt electoral system.

In Scotland, 412,386 votes cast for the Conservatives (a sixth of the poll) realised 1 seat.

In the South East, the Conservatives polled almost exactly half the vote and snaffled 89% of the seats.

In the North east, Labour polled 43.6% of the vote and took 86% of the seats - almost double their true entitlement.

That a modern democracy should allow its Government to be chosen by what amounts to a lottery is a disgrace.