“I was there!”

Sometimes, hopefully not. Avoid the car crashes of life, if you can; car crashes as described HERE
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The “car crashes” arose because of the poor quality of judgments in three cases, English, Withers and Verrechia.

In English, the court of appeal remarked:

The Judge could have explained the issue and his reasoning process in comparatively few words. It is regrettable that he did not do so and that it has taken the appellate process and the assistance of counsel who appeared at the trial to enable us to follow the Judge’s reasoning. Having done so we conclude that this appeal must be dismissed.”

In Withers the court remarked:

We turn to the section of the judgment dealing with causation. We have not found this easy to analyse. We have been able to identify a number of different reasons for the Judge’s conclusions, but these are not set out in logical order; they are intertwined. So far as the expert evidence is concerned, the Judge has attempted to summarise the technical issues, but on occasion fallen between two stools, so that the relevance of the facts set out in the judgment to the particular issue is incomprehensible.”

In Verrechia the court, although finding, substantially in favour of the Plaintiff did not award him his costs. It gave no reasons for this course.

Matters were in each case made more difficult by the decision of the court of appeal in concluding that, while the judgments were deficient, it was possible to discover what the reasons for the judgment were in each case. Consequently, the appellants although aggrieved at the absence of reasons in the original judgments did not win on appeal and lost more money on legal costs.