Bombarded with nuisance telephone calls?

Everyone at one time or another has experienced the frustration of cold calling. The majority of people will experience this and in the event that it is a one off, or from various different companies, this may be easily ignored. So what is the position where you experience relentless calls which can be considered to be aggressive in nature? The Protection from Harassment Act 1997 states that a person must not pursue a course of conduct which amounts to harassment of another and which he knows or ought to know amounts to harassment. So what is harassment? Harassment is deliberate conduct directly against another person or other people which attains a certain level of severity or if it is of such gravity to justify the sanctions of criminal law.

Article by Lucy Walpole

These cases are not uncommon and the courts have recognised in Majrowski v Guy’s and Thomas’s NHS Trust [2006] that a case for harassment, the boundary between ‘conduct which is unattractive, even unreasonable, and conduct which is oppressive and unacceptable’ needs to be recognised. The important point to consider with any civil claim is whether the court is likely to take the view that the level of contact was reasonable in the circumstances. Take for instance a client of a bank who owes money. The judgment in the key case of Roberts v Bank of Scotland PLC [2013] provided that the bank was entitled to contact their client to ‘seek a mutually acceptable resolution of the problem’ but that the mere existence of a debt ‘does not give the creditor the right to bombard the debtor with endless and repeated telephone calls’. In this case, Ms Roberts was awarded a sum of £7,500.00 in damages for the harassment caused as a result of repeated phone calls. 

Refugee Crisis

It has been impossible to miss seeing the harrowing photographs in the News of Syrian refugees, many of whom have died fleeing into neighbouring countries. The most harrowing image for me was that of the three year old Aylan Kurdi’s body, which was washed up on a beach in Turkey. That image urged me to do something to help these people.

Article by Patricia Ling

I have found that people do not know how to help and I was not sure what to do for the best myself, so I contacted a local friend, Charles Ledsam, who was able to put me in touch with Acorn Camps in Hungary. Acorn Hungary Trust (known as AcornCamps) was founded in 2001 and is based at Bicske, not far from Budapest. It is now led by Anglican priest Andy Oatridge and his wife Zsofi. They moved to Hungary in Summer 2013 with their three young children.

The Trust’s original aim was to provide summer camps with Hungarian churches for teenagers in Hungary. However, in the last few weeks things have taken a rather different turn.

Remember a charity in your will week, 7 – 13 September 2015

Chris and I were very pleased to support this year’s ‘Remember a charity in your will week’. The week aimed to increase awareness of the importance of charitable legacies, and encouraged more people to think about including a good cause in their Will.

Many of our clients like to include a gift to charity once they have looked after their loved ones. For some it is a chance to give back, perhaps to a medical charity who have supported them through their final years. For others, it is remembering a charity who helped look after a close relative during a difficult time, or simply a charity they believe to be a particularly good cause.

No Win No Fee – What does that mean?

Looking for free legal representation in a personal injury claim? When it comes to litigation cases like personal injury, solicitors cannot act for free but they can act under agreements that are commonly known as No Win No Fee agreements.

But what does No Win No Fee mean?  It means that we agree to take on your case and do not charge you for our time and expenses until you win your claim. When you do win we take the benefit of the general costs rule in litigation which is that the losing party pays the winner’s costs. We therefore submit our bill of costs that would otherwise be payable by our client, to the opposition party to pay.  The opposition party generally only have to pay our ‘reasonable costs’ which means that they will do their best to reduce our costs to what they consider to be reasonable. If we cannot reach an agreement on what costs are reasonably incurred then the matter is taken to court and before a judge to make that decision.