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With many more people running businesses from home in a post-COVID-19 world, the spotlight has inevitably fallen on commonplace restrictions on the use to which domestic premises can lawfully be put. In a case on point, a couple required a tribunal's authorisation to open a home-based childminding business. The title deeds to the couple's home contained two restrictive covenants in common form, the older of them dating back to 1937. Together, they confined the property's use to that of a private dwelling house and specifically forbade its use for any...

A furniture designer who bought his dream home only to find Japanese knotweed behind the garden shed has successfully sued the seller for tens of thousands of pounds. Jonathan Downing, 30, bought a three-bedroom house in Raynes Park, south west London, for £700,000 from chartered accountant Jeremy Henderson, 41, in August 2018. While tidying the garden soon after moving in, Mr Downing discovered Japanese knotweed canes behind a large St John’s wort bush which was growing next to the shed. Japanese knotweed is an invasive plant species, known for its ability to spread and...

Taking legal advice when making your will is more than likely to reap dividends after you are gone. In one case, a solicitor's wholly reliable evidence proved decisive in resolving an extraordinarily bitter family inheritance dispute. By his final will, a man left his residuary estate to the sister of a woman with whom he had lived for many years but who predeceased him. The validity of the will was, however, challenged in court by the woman's two children. They said that the man had treated them as his sons...

Delays in surrogacy treatment in England may be long but, as a High Court ruling showed, those who look abroad to fulfil their desire for parenthood may well be placing their own and their children's legal status at risk. The case concerned a same-sex couple who lived in Thailand, one of whom was British. Desperate to have a family and faced with long waiting lists in the UK, they resorted to a foreign surrogacy agency which they found online. Eggs donated by a Cambodian woman were fertilised using the British...