Finding Cases: Video 1 for the end of the chapter

Video titled: Finding Cases: Video 1 for the end of the chapter

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So we need to find a case that was heard in the Civil Division of the Courts of Appeal. We don't know much about it, other than the fact that a number 12 Routemaster bus, a London bus, seriously injured an eleven-year-old boy - that's all we know. So, let's see what we can do using Westlaw, here, and we’ll go into the “Cases” tab. So we have some free text that we can use to search, and we’ll try “number 12 Routemaster bus”, and we’ll have a search and see what we can find.

Okay, so we got six matching results. We know that this case was heard in the Civil Division of the Court of Appeal, so it could be Owens and Owens, there (it’s not that one because that was in the County Court). Could be that one, Chadli and Brooks - that's a criminal case, so it’s not that. Queen’s Bench Division, not that. Civil Division of the Court of Appeal - could be that. So we’ve got three possibles, and the thing to do is to go through and see what other information we have about them. First one here, Owens and Owens, is a family case, so it doesn't sound like that's going to involve much injury. The next one, Chadli and Brooks, has negligence and damages, so that could be it. We’ll go through and see what the transcript says.

So the official transcript of this one, we can go down and read a little bit of the facts of the case. So, here, the claimant was eleven-and-a-half years of age and was seriously injured by a number 12 bus. So this is the case that we want. What we want to know is the boy’s litigation friend. Now, a litigation friend is someone who makes decisions about court case for either an adult without mental capacity to do so for themselves, or a child. So this is a child one. Go back up to the top, and we can see that Gavin Chadli was represented here by his mother and litigation friend, Susan Charles. So the answer to the question: the boy’s litigation friend was Susan Charles, who was his mother.

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