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Halcrow V.

Decent Essays

Judgment The judge had found that there was a reasonable prospect of litigation in January 2002 report when Halcrow was appointed. However, the instructions from the reinsurers were not for the predominant purpose of anticipated litigation. Consequently, the litigation privilege would not be attached to Halcrow’s reports. The line divided between a reasonable prospect of litigation and a mere possibility was not clear and the judge thought that this might came close to a borderline case. However, the judge took it into account that the insurance cover was only available for the roads constructed according to the certain standards and this could be confirmed by conducting a survey within a reasonable period of time. After the survey had been …show more content…

The reason was that the roads were not constructed according to the standard in which the end results were the rejection of the claim from the reinsurers as well as that the litigation would inevitably …show more content…

In addition, he said that it was profoundly unsatisfactory as the reinsurers were claiming the privilege while retaining Halcrow as their expert in the litigation. If the reinsurers were to be entitled with the privilege that they had a right to it, this however seems that most of the material in dispute would have a disclosed anyway. Hence, it was considered to be wasteful and inefficient to spend time just to argue about the claim to the privilege in which the short period of time would be irrelevant. Commentary The claim for the litigation privilege was foundered because the civil engineers were instructed for dual purposes with equal importance in which only one of these purposes might have the lead to the denial of insurance cover and potential litigation. Based on the judge’s comments, he suggested that he might have reached a different conclusion if the instructions and the reports were to be separated into distinct parts in which one of them was in the quantum and the another one was on contentious issue of coverage. Besides that, the judge had clearly took a dim view of the reinsurers on claiming the privilege that would have to be disclosed anyway when Halcrow had provided their expert evidence to the court. The reinsurers might found

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