Two recent County Court decisions (Mead v British Airways Plc (Unreported) Manchester County Court, 15 January 2018 and McKendry v British Airways Plc (Unreported) Liverpool County Court, 7 June 2018) have come to identical conclusions that personal injury claims under the Montreal Convention do not engage the EL/PL Pre-action Protocol. The result is that these claims were deemed to fall outside the fixed costs provisions of CPR Part 45.
In summary, DJ Moss and DJ Baldwin (the latter sitting as a Regional Costs Judge) considered that Convention claims were ‘sui generis’ such that they did not arise out of ‘a breach of a statutory or common law duty of care’ for the purposes of the Protocol threshold criteria in para. 1.1(18).
DJ Baldwin also noted that the new Package Travel Protocol (considered in detail here) specifically excluded Athens and Montreal Convention claims, which supported the proposition that such claims were properly excluded from the low value fixed costs regime.
Copies of the judgments can be found on Gordon Exall’s Civil Litigation Brief blog.