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If you are a council tenant and are anxious to ensure that a loved one succeeds to your tenancy after your death, you should seek legal advice straight away. A High Court case powerfully illustrated the potentially dire consequences of failing to do so. The case concerned a 68-year-old woman who had lived in a three-bedroom council house, of which her mother was the secure tenant, since she was an 11-year-old girl. Following her mother's death, the local authority sought a possession order against her on the basis that she...

Divorcees who are unwilling to give ground and negotiate responsibly with a view to achieving a financial settlement with their ex-spouses are highly likely to pay a stiff price for their lack of flexibility. The High Court emphasised the point in a guideline case. Following a hotly contested hearing of the big money case, the Court ordered that the wife should exit the marriage with assets worth £7.45 million. The legal costs of the proceedings came to £1.6 million, about 13 per cent of the overall marital assets. A further...

The trouble with wills that have not been professionally drafted is that they very often signally fail either to accurately reflect the testator's wishes or to achieve fairness. That was certainly so in the case of a man who, by his home-made will, all but disinherited the wife to whom he had for many years been happily married. The man died in his 60s following a long struggle with motor neurone disease. Left to grieve were his wife and four children, two of them from a previous marriage. By his...

Sporting and other community facilities are obviously desirable but, as a guideline High Court ruling showed, there are effective legal steps you can take if they become a magnet for anti-social behaviour that amounts to a statutory nuisance. Three householders who said that they were plagued by noise emanating from a nearby multi-games area and skate park sought an abatement order against the facility's owner and occupier, the local parish council. Their application under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 was, however, rejected by a judge. In doing so, he drew a...