Gross negligence
Is there anything to be gained, under an English law contract, from insisting your liability be restricted to losses occasioned by your gross negligence?
This correspondent is of the view that that is hard to sustain in the face of stout objection. These days, Gross negligence does means something at English law – obiter - but it not entirely clear what:
“Certainly the last time this issue came before the Court of Appeal they decided that the debate about its meaning was a “somewhat sterile and semantic one” (Linklaters publication)
The tack one gets obliged to take is “look, if we muck up we’re not going to stand on ceremony here, so don’t worry about the legal docs” – which isn’t the most edifying position for a lawyer to take, implying as it does that we may as well not have the document at all. And it does beg the question why we bother to make an argument for ourselves on this. After all if we’re negligent, we’re negligent, and it isn’t a great look to try to defend ourselves against an innocent and irate client on the basis we’ve only been a bit negligent.