Damages and liability.

Every loss raises two distinct questions: who is liable, and how much it is worth. The first is a matter of evidence and causation, the second of assessment criteria and medico-legal expertise. We advise injured parties, businesses and insurers on healthcare and professional liability, product liability, directors' liability and personal injury, from out-of-court negotiation through to proceedings on the merits.

Civil liability is the area where the law is tested against the facts: reconstructing the event, establishing causation, discharging the burden of proof and, finally, translating the loss into a figure. It is a path where legal expertise alone is not enough, and where the quality of the evidence-gathering counts for more than the eloquence of the pleading. We advise injured parties, businesses and insurers on medical and healthcare liability, professional liability, product and dangerous-activity liability, directors' and officers' liability (D&O), loss caused by unlawful data processing and cyber incidents, and road traffic claims. We work across the whole process: from gathering evidence to negotiating with insurers, from mediation to trial, combining legal expertise with specialist medico-legal advice whenever the quantification of personal injury is the real battleground.

The perimeter of liability is expanding rapidly and not always predictably. The new European rules on defective product liability extend the notion of product to software and artificial intelligence systems and ease the claimant's burden of proof in technically complex cases. At the same time, decisions taken by automated systems - in recruitment, credit scoring, claims handling, assisted diagnostics - raise the question of who is liable when harm originates in an algorithm: the provider, whoever trained it, or whoever deployed it. On the coverage side, we support clients in reviewing policies before they are needed and in disputes over whether cover responds once a loss has occurred: exclusions, limits, claims-made clauses and notification duties are the point at which promised protection proves real or merely apparent.