Pain & suffering from judicial college
It’s out. The 15th edition (orange covered) of the Judicial College Guidelines for the assessment of general damages in personal injury cases was published on 26 November 2019 by Oxford University Press. This should send you off to revise CPR Pt 36 offers and kick yourself (before the clients kick you) for the settlements you have advised on since last November. It’s a moot point as to the stage at which failure to heed the uplifted ranges of damages might be evidence of professional negligence. Of course, the guidelines do not settle the ranges but reflect the awards which have been made by the courts since the previous edition. This in itself is an almost impossible task given the introduction’s admission that there have been ‘remarkably few’ awards in the two years which have elapsed since the 14th edition. What is inescapable is that the RPI has seen a 7% increase over those two years and this has been factored into the guideline’s newest figures. In most cases the figures are circa 7% up.
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