Riding the caffeine wave

I've just had a week of pretty unpleasant surprises. The three parties in one of my cases scheduled a without prejudice meeting on Tuesday morning at the claimant's solicitors' London office. I set up a telephone conference with the co-defendant's solicitors on the Monday afternoon, with a view to discussing our respective positions and strategy in advance of the meeting. It seemed to go well and I was finalising my preparations on the Monday evening when an email arrived attaching the claimant's costs schedule. Including a success fee and an after-the-event insurance premium their costs are a staggering seven and a half times higher than ours. For a fleeting moment I thought the decimal point may be in the wrong place. It wasn't the best start.

I travelled down to London on the 8am train from Manchester on Tuesday in first class to ensure sufficient space and some peace and quiet. It all went well until Crewe, where a loud and obnoxious businessman boarded the carriage while shouting into his mobile phone, which he continued to do most of the way to London. Some poor fellow named Nick was at the other end of the line, and amid the self-important name drops (which included MI5 and 'the president', although I suspect not of the USA) there was a considerable amount of foul language. I'm not the best at tuning out unwanted noise while trying to focus, and I found myself fervently hoping in a very uncharitable fashion that he would choke on his full fry-up or perhaps the extra slices of toast that he consumed with it, but no.

I arrived for my meeting nice and early but a little out of kilter thanks to the above irritation. My day didn't improve much when during the opening session the co-defendant's solicitor, the same extremely pleasant man with whom I'd had the telephone conference the previous afternoon, announced that his client is on the verge of insolvency. That's not usually such big news in my field as it may sound, as there will ordinarily be an insurance company behind the professional who has been sued, meaning that the claim can still be defended or settled if appropriate. However, in this case the full bombshell was that our co-defendant is also uninsured. Oh.

Near miss

Moving swiftly on, in another matter I had my closest ever swerve from a trial. The case was listed to be heard over four days in Leeds, although it was worth less than £40,000. I kicked off the negotiations to try and settle it and we made fairly decent progress, but, once again, the proportionality of costs caused something of an issue. It was finally settled during telephone negotiations less than two weeks before the trial had been due to start. That should have been the end of it, but incredibly almost another week passed before all parties had signed up to the Tomlin order, which was lodged at court just three working days before the first day of trial. At one point it was suggested that we could use some of the scheduled trial time to ask the judge to iron out the final issues in terms of the agreement that we had reached. That prospect didn't much appeal to me as I felt we would all be given fairly short shrift for wasting court time. Fortunately, several threats to imminently incur counsels' brief fees later, we managed to get there between ourselves.

Another file keeping me firmly out of trouble is worth very little but proving fairly time-consuming '“ isn't that always the way? It involves an errant tenant who failed to pay rent and allegedly damaged the property by installing numerous people and pets, contrary to the terms of the tenancy agreement. We are currently on course for a small claims court trial in a couple of weeks' time, although there is an application pending to transfer the case to another court and relist it.

Driven to drink

In order to keep apace with all of the above, I find myself relying more and more on legal substance abuse, aka caffeine, to propel me in fast forward bursts throughout the day. I am mainly tea-focused but usually suffer a chronic energy slump at around 4pm, when I bring out the seriously strong desk-stashed real coffee and ride that wave until it's time to log out. I have thus been rather thrown by two successive announcements that those around me have weaned themselves off caffeine over the last couple of weeks. They each describe feeling utterly wrung out and dreadful for the first few days, which I have to say does not appeal. One claims to have emerged from the other side of the cold turkey period now and is down to an impressive one hit per day, to kick-start the morning. The other is quaffing some imposter hot drink called 'calming whale song' or some such nonsense, and seems to still feel on the brink of exhaustive collapse. I don't think it's for me, although I have just turned down the latest 'brew crew' offer as someone in my team headed for the hot water point. I'm rather proud of myself and think I may even make it safely through the next hour.