TUI v Griffiths - Supreme Court reserves judgement
Craig Dunford KC
Senior Counsel, mediator (MCIArb), arbitrator - admitted to the bars of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, member of the Irish Maritime Law Association and the Commercial Bar Association of Northern Ireland
The Supreme Court has just finished hearing the appeal in TUI v Griffiths.
I wrote about the Court of Appeal's decision in this case both on this forum and in the Writ (magazine of the Law Society of Northern Ireland) in March of this year.
The outcome will be extremely interesting: one point, however, which neither counsel addressed in submissions (and which no member of the Court raised) was whether TUI could have made a submission of no case to answer (or as we still call it, an application for a direction) at the close of Mr Griffiths' case, and if so, whether - and how - the absence of any challenge to the claimant's expert evidence would have featured in the trial court's approach to the case. Might this feature in the Supreme Court's judgement? We'll have to wait and see...