Patricia Pearl has been a solicitor in practice and latterly a Judge in a busy county court until elevation. She is used to hearing actions across the full spectrum of work, including consumer law, debt collection, road traffic and cases related to personal injury, employment and landlord and tenant. Andrew Goodman is a barrister in practice. Their book is practical and authoritative, its contents including: . Financial limits, cases excluded and choice of county court . Commencing proceedings, defending proceedings and the pre-arbitration hearing . Preparations for the hearing, lay representatives . The hearing: practice, evidence and presentation issues . Mediation . Challenging the result . Precedents . Enforcement . Fees and terms.

A man slips on the dancefloor and breaks his leg - he recovers damages. A child has both legs amputated as a result of meningitis, and is awarded nothing. The law's justification for awarding damages in the first case is that the man's injury was the fault of someone else, while in the second case damages are denied because nobody was at fault. This critique of the present law and practice relating to damages, shows that the damages system is in fact a lottery. It contends that the public are paying far too much for an unfair and inefficient insurance system, and that reform is long overdue. The book concludes that actions for damages for injuries should be abolished and replaced with a new no-fault road accident scheme, and actions for injuries should be dealt with by individual or group insurance policies.