(back to preceding text)

    For these reasons, I agree with the order proposed by my noble and learned friend Lord Bingham of Cornhill as to the disposal of both the appeal and the cross-appeal. I also agree with the order proposed by him as to costs.

LORD COOKE OF THORNDON

My Lords,

    Having had the advantage of reading in draft the speech of my noble and learned friend Lord Bingham of Cornhill, I agree with all that he says on the subject of abuse of process. The course adopted by the parties of settling Westway Homes Limited's claim against Gore Wood & Co., but leaving open any personal claim by Mr Johnson against the same solicitors, subject to a cap on certain heads of damages and an undertaking concerning personal guarantees, strikes me as a sensible one: the personal claim against the solicitors plainly involves different and more difficult issues. The belated raising by the defendants of the contention, more ingenious than realistic, that the settlement had the effect of preventing the personal claim seems to me closer to abuse of process than the plaintiff's conduct in pursuing the claim. The defendants are saved from that stigma by the acceptance of their contention by the Court of Appeal, but I agree that on this part of the case the appeal of the plaintiff must be allowed.

    On the recoverability of personal damages, I have much more difficulty, for the following reasons. It will be convenient to deal first with the claim for quantifiable financial loss, secondly with the claim based on other forms of suffering.

Damages for Quantifiable Financial Loss

    As the present is an action by one claiming to be a personal client against solicitors, not an action by a shareholder against a company and directors, the case of Prudential Assurance Co. Ltd v Newman Industries Ltd (No. 2) [1982] Ch. 204, including the well-known passage at 222-223, has only a limited bearing. The cash box illustration given by the Court of Appeal (Cumming-Bruce, Templeman and Brightman L.JJ.) is not helpful in this case because it does not envisage any loss except of the company's £100,000. It is by no means self-evident that, if the controlling shareholder had lost a valuable business opportunity for want of prompt access to the company's money, he would have been unable to recover damages for that loss caused by the defendant's deceit and theft of the cash box. The court did give as a possible instance of a recoverable personal loss the cost caused to the shareholder in consequence of a fraudulent circular, such as the cost of attending a meeting; but this single specific example is not fully illuminating. Nothing that I am about to say involves any criticism of the decision in the Prudential case or anything said in it. My point is simply that it was not concerned with the kind of issue arising in the present case and contains no observations about this kind of issue. The same applies to Stein v. Blake [1998] 1 All E.R. 724.

    As the report of Christensen v Scott [1996] 1 N.Z.L.R. 273 may not be readily available in England, it is as well to reproduce here the whole of the relevant passage in the judgment of the Court of Appeal delivered by Thomas J. I must not conceal that I was a member of the court of five on behalf of whom the judge spoke, although I confess to little independent recollection of the case. It was a case in which the defendants, firms of chartered accountants and solicitors, acted for the plaintiffs personally and in the course of doing so advised on channelling their assets into a company taking a lease of farm land. Naturally the defendants came to act for the company as well. By reason of alleged negligence on the part of the defendants the consent of the landlord's mortgagees was not obtained, nor was a caveat registered against the title. Consequently the land was lost and the company failed. The company's claim against the defendants was settled by the liquidator for a sum alleged by the plaintiffs to be totally inadequate. The Court of Appeal held that the personal claims should not be struck out before trial. Thomas J. said at 280-281 -

"We do not need to enter upon a close examination of the Newman Industries decision. It has attracted not insignificant and, at times, critical comment. See eg L C B Gower, Gower's Principles of Modern Company Law (5th ed, 1992) at pp 647-653; L S Sealy, "Problems of Standing, Pleading and Proof in Corporate Litigation" (Ed, B.G. Pettit) at p 1 esp at pp 6-10; and M J Sterling, "The Theory and Policy of Shareholder Actions in Tort" (1987) 50 MLR. 468, esp at pp 470-474. It may be accepted that the Court of Appeal was correct, however, in concluding that a member has no right to sue directly in respect of a breach of duty owed to the company or in respect of a tort committed against the company. Such claims can only be bought by the company itself or by a member in a derivative action under an exception to the rule in Foss v Harbottle (1843) 2 Hare 461. But this is not necessarily to exclude a claim brought by a party, who may also be a member, to whom a separate duty is owed and who suffers a personal loss as a result of a breach of that duty Where such a party, irrespective that he or she is a member, has personal rights and these rights are invaded, the rule in Foss v Harbottle is irrelevant. Nor would the claim necessarily have the calamitous consequences predicted by counsel in respect of the concept of corporate personality and limited liability. The loss arises not from a breach of duty owed to the company but from a breach of duty owed to the individuals. The individual is simply suing to vindicate his own right or redress a wrong done to him or her giving rise to a personal loss.

    When that passage is read as a whole, two features will be noted. It will be seen not only that the whole passage is throughout guarded and provisional, but also that the court recognised both that double recovery cannot be permitted and that the interests of creditors may require consideration. In this field, if a client is suing his own solicitor, it would appear that only the problems of double recovery or prejudice to the company's creditors would justify denying or limiting the right to recover personal damages which, on ordinary principles of foreseeability, would otherwise arise. One other observation should be made about the passage in Thomas J.'s judgment. Although he did mention that Prudential had not gone without criticism, he did not find it necessary to examine that case closely. I would repeat that in no way am I criticising it. On the contrary I accept it to the full.

    The next closest of the English reported cases cited is Barings plc (in administration) v Coopers & Lybrand [1997] 1 B.C.C.L.R. 427, 435. In that case (arising from the activities of Mr Leeson) a United Kingdom company was suing the auditors of its Singapore subsidiary; the auditors were also responsible for supplying audit information for the group accounts. On a pre-trial appeal, Leggatt L.J. stated the law in terms which, albeit briefer, are much the same as those of Thomas J. in Christensen v Scott, which case was cited by Leggatt L.J.

    Gerber Garment Technology Inc. v Lectra Systems Ltd [1997] R.P.C. 443 is more distant from the present case on the facts. It was a suit for infringement of patents in which some of the lost profits for which the plaintiff company claimed damages were suffered by subsidiary companies in which it held all the shares. The decision was that, when a shareholder has a cause of action but his company has none, he can recover damages measured by the reduction in value of his shareholding; but that the plaintiff must prove the amount of his own loss and that it cannot be assumed that this is the same as the loss suffered by the company. Such relevance as the case has lies in the reasoning of Hobhouse L.J. (as he then was) in the Court of Appeal. At 474 he described Christensen v Scott as "a good illustration of the application of the relevant principles." After an extensive quotation from the judgment in that case, he added at 475 -

"There is no reason to suppose that this case would have been differently decided in England. The decision helpfully illustrates that, provided that the plaintiff can establish a personal cause of action and can prove a personal loss caused by the defendant's actionable wrong, then the fact that the loss is felt by the plaintiff in the form of the loss of the value of the plaintiff's shares in a company is no answer to the plaintiff's claim. (In that case, as in the present case, no question of remoteness arose.)"

    Thus Christensen v Scott does not appear to have caused problems for English judges hitherto, and I would hope that this position might continue. But it is necessary to add some further discussion of principle, as on the facts the present case is not on all fours with that case or any of the others cited in argument.

    Assuming that this is a fairly typical case of a man carrying on business wholly or partly through a company or companies controlled by him, the first question at a trial will be whether Gore Wood & Co. owed duties to Mr Johnson personally as well as to Westway Homes Limited. Such personal duties could arise from a contract of retainer or in tort because of the closeness of relations ("proximity"), or from both sources concurrently. Henderson v Merrett Syndicates Ltd [1995] 2 A.C. 145 finally established in English law the legitimacy of recognising that professional advisers may owe to the same client a duty to exercise reasonable care and skill derived from both contract and tort law. Conceivably the rules as to remoteness or the measure of damages could produce different consequences; but in the interests of justice and the clarity of the law this should obviously be avoided unless forced upon the courts. The duty in such a case is most simply seen as a civil law obligation to conform to professional standards. In the argument it was not suggested that for the purposes of this appeal there is any material difference.

    Although more elaborately pleaded here, the duty owed to the personal claimant would be to exercise reasonable care and professional skill in handling the legal side of his affairs and those of his relevant company. In this case it would include the elementary responsibility of exercising efficiently the company's option to purchase Mr Moores' land, on the basis that the risk of personal loss to Mr Johnson from a questionable exercise of the option was reasonably foreseeable by Gore Wood & Co. The duty was one of taking reasonable steps to safeguard his interests, not one of indemnity. Subject to that important qualification, there is some analogy with a contract of insurance When a solicitor is acting for both a shareholder personally and his company, the essence of the personal relationship is that the individual looks to the solicitor for care to provide personal financial protection.

    That brings the discussion to what is perhaps the crucial point in this case. The required degree of personal protection will extend, I think, to protection against the operation of rules of law that might foreseeably restrict the individual's right to recover damages if no duty were owed to him personally by the solicitor. In cases of the present class, two such rules may be relevant among other factors. One may be called the rule in Prudential v Newman Industries, using that as a shorthand to convey that a shareholder in a company has as such no right to recover from a third party damages for breach of the latter's duty to the company. The other may be called the rule in The Lips, using that as shorthand for the proposition in Lips Maritime Corp. v President of India [1988] A.C. 395, 425 per Lord Brandon of Oakbrook -

"There is no such thing as a cause of action in damages for late payment of damages. The only remedy which the law affords for delay in paying damages is the discretionary award of interest pursuant to statute."

    But for the solicitor's duty owed to the individual client, such restrictions could result in inability on the part of the latter to recover damages caused to him by the solicitor's negligence. Thus in the present case, whereas the option should have been exercised in a unquestionable manner in February 1988, it was not until more than four years later that the land was belatedly conveyed to Westway Homes Limited, and not until a further period of about eight months had elapsed that the company obtained a monetary settlement of its claim against the solicitors.

    Mr Johnson alleges (inter alia) that in the meantime the property market had collapsed, the development project had ceased to be financially advantageous, and he had incurred very high interest charges for personal borrowings. To the extent that he can establish at a trial that the delay in the obtaining by the company of the land or monetary compensation was caused or materially contributed to by negligence on the part of the defendant solicitors, there would appear to be no sound reason for denying him personal relief for any damages foreseeably caused to him personally by the delay: provided always that double recovery is not sanctioned and the interests of the company's creditors are protected.

    While double recovery has to be avoided, at this pre-trial stage I would not rule out the possibility that, on the close scrutiny at trial spoken of by Lord Bingham of Cornhill, it will be found that the ultimate agreed payment to the company was not intended to and did not in fact adequately compensate Mr Johnson for the company's want of title to the land in early 1988. It may be chiefly a matter of the timing. The rule in The Lips would not exclude the plaintiff's personal claim; he is not claiming damages for delay in paying damages to him. Rather he is claiming damages for the fact that his company did not have the land in 1988 - a claim outside the provenance and the purview of the rule in The Lips.

    Thus the true scope of the settlement in 1992 is one of the matters requiring examination. In the instant case the settlement covered a very large part of the company's claim. It may well have been a reasonable settlement, reached after having due regard to the interests of the company's creditors, who could not successfully claim that more should have been recovered. There may nevertheless be some possibility that, in addition to any other right to personal damages that he may have against the solicitors, Mr Johnson could be heard to say against them that in any event he should be compensated for his company not having recovered fully. Such a possibility may be more significant in a case like Christensen v Scott where the shareholder has opposed and complains of the inadequacy of the company's settlement; but I do not think that it can be ignored in the present case at this stage.

    In a company winding up the liquidator may be liable to the company for negligence on his part in making a compromise: see In re Windsor Steam Coal Co. (1901) Ltd [1929] 1 Ch. 151; In re Home & Colonial Insurance Co. Ltd [1930] 1 Ch. 102. Accordingly I think that in cases within that principle the court should avoid sanctioning not only double recovery, but also any real prospect of double recovery. As this aspect was not explored in argument, it need not now be explored further.

    Apart from the question of any shortfall in the company's recovery, I think that Mr Johnson could have a good personal claim against the solicitors for compensation on the basis already stated, that is to say on the basis that the damages claimed by him were not suffered by the company. Accordingly I agree with Lord Bingham that the claimed heads of damages numbered in his speech 1, 2, 4 and 5 should not be struck out before trial, and that the same applies to the part of head 3 relating to the enhancement of the value of Mr Johnson's pension if the payments had been duly made. I am rather less clear that the remaining parts of head 3 should be struck out. Certainly, however, these claims relating to lost payments into a pension fund or retention of corresponding amounts in the company's assets look very much like claims for double recovery. As the other members of your Lordships' Appellate Committee are in no doubt that they should be struck out, I am content to concur in that conclusion.

    In short, agreeing that at the strike-out stage any reasonable doubt must be resolved in favour of the claimant, I think it safer to avoid fine distinctions, especially before trial; and, with the very limited exceptions just mentioned, to leave all the extant claims in this case of complicated facts open for examination at trial. The open questions would include remoteness. And I would add one other cautionary remark. The trial judge would have to consider, not only issues of double recovery by Mr Johnson and the company, but also any issue of overlapping among Mr Johnson's claims themselves.

Damages for General Suffering

"A contract-breaker is not in general liable for any distress, frustration, anxiety, displeasure, vexation, tension or aggravation which his breach of contract may cause to the innocent party. This rule is not, I think, founded on the assumption that such reactions are not foreseeable, which they surely are or may be, but on considerations of policy.

    I regard that as an authoritative statement of the present law of England regarding commercial contracts. The exceptional category is not confined, in my view, to contracts to provide pleasure and the like. For example, breaches of contracts for status such as membership of a trade union or a club may carry damages for injured feelings; but it is unnecessary to go into that area further, as I accept that, if there was a contract between Mr Johnson and Gore Wood & Co., it is to be classified in English law as commercial in the sense that damages for mere distress are not available. Contract-breaking is treated as an incident of commercial life which players in the game are expected to meet with mental fortitude. For present purposes it may be assumed that the same principle applies insofar as the claim is grounded in tort: see Hayes v Dodd [1990] 2 All E.R. 815, 826-827 per Purchas L.J. A fuller discussion of these various matters can be found in Mouat v Clark Boyce [1992] 2 N.Z.L.R. 559 (a stage of the litigation not under consideration by the Privy Council in Clark Boyce v Mouat [1994] 1 A.C. 428).

    But that does not quite dispose of Mr Johnson's claim for non-quantifiable damage. He alleges extreme financial embarrassment; it is said that from a state of some prosperity he was reduced to subsistence on social security benefit. He also alleges deterioration in his family relationships, particularly with his wife and son. Although the pleader has treated them as mental distress, such consequences are in truth significantly more than mental distress. They are more akin to the physical inconvenience and discomfort referred to in Bingham L.J.'s third paragraph. In my opinion the common law would be defective and stray too far from reality, humanity and justice if it remorselessly shut out even a restrained award under these heads. Hence I would leave the claim in this part of the case standing also, although only on the footing that damages could not be awarded merely for injured feelings, nor could aggravated damages be awarded merely on that account.

    English case law has fluctuated as to the recoverability of damages in contract for mental distress, as is detailed in McGregor on Damages 16th ed. (1997) paragraphs 98 to 106. See also Dr Harvey McGregor's preface at vii to viii. But it has been established since Victorian times that, by contrast with mere mental distress, damages are recoverable for substantial inconvenience and discomfort. Thus in Hobbs v. London and South Western Railway Co. (1875) L.R. 10 Q.B. 111 a court including Cockburn C.J. and Blackburn and Mellor JJ. upheld an award to a husband and wife for the inconvenience of having to walk home with young children four or five miles late on a drizzling night, although the wife's catching of a cold was found too remote. That case was applied by Barry J. in Bailey v. Bullock [1950] 2 All E.R. 1167 in awarding damages against solicitors for the inconvenience to the plaintiff of having to live in an overcrowded house. Such authorities are treated in McGregor, paragraphs 93 to 96, as surviving the recent restriction of damages for mental distress. The third paragraph already quoted from Bingham L.J. in Watts v. Morrow is largely supported by them. The line may not always be easy to draw, and it is particularly difficult before trial to assess the weight of the claims in the present case. But both a changed way of life because of poverty and damaged family relationships can be grievous forms of non-pecuniary harm. I am respectfully unable to agree that they should be ruled out of the law's purview.

    Before parting with the case I would say something about Addis v Gramophone Co. [1909] A.C. 488. In severely confining damages for wrongful dismissal, your Lordships' House of those days appears to have seen the relationship of employer and employee as no more than an ordinary commercial one. This is a world away from the concept now, and in Mahmud v Bank of Credit and Commerce International SA (in liq.) [1998] A.C. 20 the House accepted that there is an implied obligation of mutual trust and confidence, and that an employer is under an implied obligation that he will not, without reasonable and proper cause, conduct his business in a manner likely to destroy or seriously damage that relationship. Damages for financial loss, including impaired employment prospects, caused by harm to reputation could be recovered. It is true that Addis was distinguished on the ground that it related to injury to feelings caused by the manner of termination of the relationship, which question did not arise in Mahmud: see Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead at 38 and Lord Steyn at 51. But the philosophy is altogether different, as is the philosophy embodied in modern employment legislation. Again, as Lord Bingham has pointed out, Addis was not applied in Ruxley Electronics and Construction Ltd v Forsyth [1996] A.C. 344. Addis has not uniformly been followed in the Commonwealth: see Brown v Waterloo Regional Board of Commissioners of Police (1982) 136 D.L.R. (3d) 49, a judgment of Linden J. (the author of Canadian Tort Law, now in its sixth edition). The decision was reversed on other grounds, but Linden J.'s statements of principle were substantially accepted: 152 D.L.R. (3rd) 729. According to that authority, an employee wrongfully dismissed may recover damages for mental distress in some circumstances. To the same effect is Whelan v Waitaki Meats Ltd [1991] 2 N.Z.L.R. 74, which contains an instructive survey of the authorities by Gallen J. I take leave to doubt the permanence of Addis in English law. But it is not a question arising in the present case either; I make these observations only to avoid being identified with any approbation of Addis.