Background

In 2018 Midas Construction Limited (In Liquidation) (“Midas”) entered into a contract based on the JCT Design and Build Sub-Contract 2011(“the Contract”) with Harmsworth Pension Funds Trustees Limited (“Harmsworth”). Midas was engaged as Harmsworth’s contractor to carry out "The design and construction of the Shell and Core, Fit Out and External Works of a new build student residential, private residential, and affordable housing development" ("the Works").

Background 

In December 2012, Disclosure and Barring Service (“DBS”), the public body responsible for issuing disclosure checks in England and Wales, entered into an agreement with Tata Consultancy Services (“TCS”), an IT services consultancy, to modernise DBS’s manually intensive paper-based disclosure checks by developing a new IT system. 

A landowner has failed in an appeal against a Scottish Government decision requiring the sale of an overgrown area of land in St. Andrews to a community group. 

The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016 (the “2016 Act”) Part 5 introduced the “Right to buy land to further sustainable development” – essentially a right that allows community bodies to seek the consent of the Scottish Ministers to exercise compulsory purchase of land or buildings for the purposes of furthering the achievement of sustainable development.

On 21 May 2025 The UK Supreme Court delivered a significant ruling in URS Corporation Ltd v BDW Trading Ltd [2025] UKSC 21, providing clarification on developers’ rights to recover remedial costs and the extended application of the Building Safety Act 2022.

In the current financial climate, development projects are commencing under increasingly tight budgets, with contractors typically accepting less risk under much more restrictive scopes. On hotel development projects, this adds further pressure to projects already experiencing issues such as material and labour shortages, rising operational costs, difficulties obtaining funding, and evolving guest expectations. 

A court has recently confirmed an Adjudicator’s Decision that WhatsApp messages constituted a construction contract, and invoices submitted with reference to them were therefore valid payment notices. 

Scotland has a unique hybrid legal system, incorporating elements of common law (as practiced by our neighbours in England and Wales) and civil law (influenced by continental European legal scholars, philosophies, and traditions, particularly from the Netherlands and France). The latter is especially apparent in property law, which borrows heavily from rules and principles of Roman law – this is one of the reasons why Scots law remains littered with Latin maxims.

In this article we examine the recent Glasgow Sheriff Court judgment in Jonathan Russell (as Executor of the late Stuart Russell) & Irene Russell against Rebecca Russell (as Executrix of the late Simon Russell) [2025] SC GLA 19 which concerns a £70,000 payment from father to son and whether that should be treated as a gift, or a r

In a recent case heard last year, Aabar Holdings SARL v Glencore plc and others [2024], the High Court found that the historic shareholder rule (also “the rule”) does not exist in English law. The rule stipulated that a company cannot assert its right to legal privilege against its own shareholders by withholding from them the disclosure of certain confidential communications or documents. Prior to this judgment, it was thought that shareholders had an entitlement to the disclosure of a company’s privileged documents.

May you live in interesting times. 

Members of the litigation funding community could be forgiven for thinking that they were the victims of the apocryphal Chinese curse.