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Overseas surrogacy arrangements are an effective means of completing families. As a High Court ruling showed, however, they are notoriously replete with legal pitfalls and should never be entered into without first taking professional advice. The case concerned a UK-resident couple who arranged for a surrogate mother in Georgia to carry their third child. Their gametes were used to create the embryo, but they failed to apply for a formal parental order following the birth. They had since divorced and the fact of their three-year-old son's surrogate birth only came...

When paying money to settle Employment Tribunal (ET) proceedings, employers are not infrequently motivated by a desire to make what they perceive as a nuisance go away – but how should such payments be treated for tax purposes? The First-tier Tribunal (FTT) tackled that thorny issue in a guideline case. A senior bank employee was dismissed following a regulator's investigation into an aspect of the bank's business. She asserted that she had been made a scapegoat and thrown under a bus by a white male cartel at the bank. She...

Even with the most careful drafting, there is always a risk that a will may be capable of bearing more than one meaning. In resolving a family inheritance dispute, the High Court considered the extent to which extraneous evidence of a will-maker's intentions can be used as an aid to interpretation of the words actually used. The case concerned a businessman who, by his will, bequeathed a life interest in his home to his wife if she survived him. In the event, she predeceased him. Following his death, an issue...

Finding your way around the intricacies of the planning system without professional advice is, for most people, a near impossibility. The point was powerfully made by the case of a couple whose intimate living space was overlooked by a skylight fitted to a neighbouring property. The couple said that the top-floor bedroom, study and bathroom of their home was so badly overlooked by the skylight that they could only get undressed by hiding behind a bookcase. Their neighbour periodically installed a mannequin in the skylight, giving the impression that there...