Commercial Briefing (Part 9) – Spring 2019

In this article, Andrew Bowen QC looks at the case of One Step (Support) Ltd v Morris‐Garner [2018] 2 W.L.R. 1353 where the Supreme Court considered the circumstances in which damages for breach of contract could be assessed by reference to the sum that a claimant could hypothetically have received in return for releasing a defendant from the obligation they had failed to perform, referred to as “negotiating damages”. The wider issue addressed by the court was the lack of clarity as to the theoretical underpinning of those damages and the consequent uncertainty as to when they were available.

This article was first published in Greens Business Law Bulletin, Issue 156 (October 2018) and on Westlaw. It is reproduced with the kind permission of Thomson Reuters.