The Journey

Day 1, 77 miles – The legendary Cornish hills lived up to their reputation.  After a gentle start through very pretty lanes, we dropped down to a sweeping curve around Mounts Bay during which the sun made a rare appearance.  Leaving the sea behind us, we picked up a headwind as we climbed slowly up to Truro for our first lunch stop.  After that the relentless crossing of steep valley sides can only be described as brutal!  A seemingly endless succession of steep drops followed by ever steeper climbs took us to our first overnight stop in Liskeard.  The last few cyclists came in at 8.30pm and agreed that a Premier Inn has never looked so inviting.

Day 2, 90 miles – The Cornish valleys were not done with us yet as they carried on towards Devon and dropped us down into the beautiful Tamar Valley.  The Devon border offered no respite as we climbed up to 1,000 feet against a strong head wind to get over Dartmoor and onto Okehampton.  From here the going got progressively easier as the hills became more undulating the closer we got to Somerset, although its famous Levels stubbornly refused to show themselves!  After going through Crediton and Tiverton we eventually rolled, after a very long day, into Taunton for our second overnight stop.  To a (wo)man we were very grateful for all the training the Health Performance Centre had given us to condition our legs for such hard work.

Day 3, 81 miles – With the sun shining we soon left Somerset behind us.  Passing through Castle Cary, Warminster and Westbury we were all enjoying the lack of hills, head winds and pot holes of the last two days.  Our spirits were also lifted by a group of SA Law’s friends in Devizes who had a banner out to see us on our way towards our overnight stop in Marlborough.  However, the dreaded hills returned about 20 miles or so from the finish as we had to climb up and over Pewsey Vale.  The last 15 miles in particular were torture for some, with injuries, an accident and map reading issues taking their toll towards the end of the day.  Despite these setbacks everyone eventually arrived safely and thoughts turned to the final day: would the sun shine again and could we really cover our distance in 4 days?

Day 4, 83 miles – What a difference a day makes!  This was a typical British Bank Holiday with heavy rain and strong winds which, naturally, blew in exactly the wrong direction for us.  Undeterred, we battled on to a well deserved coffee stop in Wantage, although quite what the staff in Costa Coffee made of the drowned rats that nearly flooded their floor, is another question!  The session before lunch saw only our second puncture of the trip, and with this fixed, we were more than ready for lunch as we climbed up into the Chilterns.  Rejuvenated by some hot food, and with the rain easing, spirits were lifted further as familiar place names started to appear on road signs and before too long we were back on familiar roads that we’d pounded to put our training miles in.  These just seemed to fly by with the prospect of a warm welcome back at the office – and that’s just what we got from a large crowd of colleagues, friends and family who cheered us up London Road to the finish.

Whilst our epic journey has come to an end, our fund raising efforts have not.  We’re very close to reaching our £12,012 target but not quite there yet.  So far we’ve raised £7,347.85 online and £2,425.13 offline.  Adding Gift Aid of £1,450.71, gives a current total of £11,223.69.  We only need another £788.31, so if you haven’t donated, please dig as deep as you can and donate here.

We would like thank the corporate sponsors who  made the bike ride possible: Beechwood Homes, Cantura, Giles Insurance, Hillier Hopkins, Portman Finance, Martin Pooley Associates, ProVision, PCF Limited, Brasier Freeth, Eurochange, Calor Gas and LRG.

Further Information
SA Law’s Just Giving donations page
Read more about SA Law’s Gold Challenge
About Keech Hospice care
Meet the cycling team
SA Law Partner Rob Ryall appointed Trustee for Keech
Health Performance Centre

What happened was simple: Clintons were in debt to the tune of £35m to RBS and Barclays. Those banks sold the debt to Clintons’ biggest supplier, American Greetings, and they called in the loan. Clintons couldn’t pay so administrators were appointed.

American Greetings’ motives are unclear: wouldn’t it be better to be main supplier and creditor to a trading entity than a business in administration? Will it acquire the business itself? The exotically named chief executive Zev Weiss has confirmed this is a possibility although there are said to be others interested in acquiring all or part of the business: WH Smith, rival Card Factory and investment firms OpCapita and GA Europe.

This level of interest recognises the strength of the brand and the importance of the card market. But Clintons hasn’t been doing well. In a sector which saw a 3% rise in sales last year, Clintons suffered a 3.5% drop. So what are they doing wrong? Cards are expensive (sometimes as much as £5 for a piece of card for goodness sake!), postage is ruinously expensive and online providers like Moonpig.com have taken a section of the market away from the high street. But this affects all card retailers and Clinton’s competitors, such as Card Factory, Paperchase and Scribbler are doing well with the latter reporting 15% year on year growth.

Paperchase occupies the top end of the market. Its cards aren’t cheap but they’re good quality and are only a part of the shop’s offer. There is an ever changing array of colourful stationery and quirky gift items well displayed in stylish units in carefully chosen locations. Scribbler has diversified into gifts but also specialised into cards which are at the rude end of humorous. They are popular, though, and when compared to Clintons fairly bland offer you can see why.

Card Factory is at the other end of the market – cheap, cheerful and, frankly, a bit cheesy but when it’s the thought that counts (which is surely the case with cards more than anything else) why, in these straightened times, send an expensive card when a cheap one will do?

Clintons meanwhile sits in the middle of the road and perhaps has tried too hard to please all of the people all of the time. Where once there were birthday cards and Christmas cards now there are cards for Easter, other religious festival and more dubiously cards to celebrate divorces, weight loss and your cat’s cousin’s step-mother’s wedding anniversary. Whilst it has a small range of acceptable but unadventurous cards for £1 its more unusual ranges (like the Deco range) are expensive and little of its offering stands out in a crowded market.

As well as product failures Clintons made bad business decisions: the acquisition of Birthdays in 2004 which simply increased its exposure to the struggling high street market, the fact that most of its units are in prime positions meaning a rent bill of an unbelievable £80m a year (in particular contrast to Card Factory which occupies more secondary, cheaper locations) and the apparent family feud which led the eponymous Clinton to be usurped from his position by Darcy Wilson-Rymer (another exotically named individual who is, for the avoidance of doubt, a man).

So what will happen now? Inevitably there are fears for the 8,000 employees and inevitably there will be store closures, particularly if a competitor like Card Factory or WH Smith buys the chain but, despite the shortcomings of some of its products there is a place for Clintons in high streets which already have too many empty shops. Let us hope that it will survive in some form and in some locations. And there is a broader fear – the spate of retailers getting into difficulties which have included HMV, Game and Thorntons shows no sign on abating. You can’t help wondering – who will be next?

Jacqueline Button is a Solicitor in the Real Estate Department and also SA Law’s Retail sector expert. To read previous blogs by Jacqueline, click here.

For further information about our Real Estate or Retail services, or to discuss a particular matter or situation in more detail, contact Jacqueline Button at our St Albans office by email at jacqueline.button@salaw.com or on 01727 798000.

© SA LAW 2012
Every care is taken in the preparation of our articles. However, no responsibility can be accepted to any person who acts on the basis of information contained in them. You are recommended to obtain specific advice in respect of individual cases.

The ride is in aid of Keech Hospice Care and is part of the firm’s ’2012 Gold Challenge’ in partnership with Team GB Olympic Association.  It’s not a relay and all 13 members of the team will  be completing the whole route, averaging 75 miles a day. Keech does excellent work for those it supports through far tougher times than anything we’ll encounter on the road.

The bike ride is going to be hard work but we have all been training since February through rain, ice, wind and shine and will have covered well over 1000 miles by the time we cross the finish line in St Albans.
The team have been increasing their training with the help of the Health Performance Centre based in St Albans to ensure we are all in tip-top shape and ready to face the thigh-burning hills en-route!

A big thank you to everyone who has already donated and helped us to raise an impressive £3,006.12 so far.

We would be very grateful if you could dig as deep as you can to sponsor the team and support our challenge – donations can be made by visiting our ‘Lands End to St Albans’ JustGiving page.

Further information:

Read more about SA Law’s Gold Challenge

Meet the Cycling Team

About Keech Hopsice

SA Law Partner Rob Ryall appointed Trustee for Keech Hospice

These were schemes set up to require that landlords paid the tenancy deposit into a government authorized scheme and confirm details of these arrangements with the tenant to prevent exploitation of tenants at the end of a tenancy.  Failure to do so meant that a landlord could not rely on section 21 as a ground for possession and faced returning the deposit and a fine to the value of three times the value of the deposit for non-compliance.

The courts took the view that the punishment did not fit the crime, particularly in relation to the fine payable and the decisions in Tiensia v Vision Enterprises Ltd (trading as Universal Estates); Honeysuckle Properties v Fletcher and others; and Gladehurst Properties Ltd v Hashemi more or less stripped the legislation of its effectiveness.

The government went back to the drawing board and under the Localism Act 2011 has tried to plug the holes created by the judiciary with some amendments to the original legislation:

1. Penalties for non-compliance apply to tenancies that have come to an end after 6 April 2012.
2. Penalties for non-compliance apply where the landlord or agent has protected the deposit after the deadline.
3. The deadline for the protection of deposits has been extended from 14 days to 30 days.
4. An element of judicial discretion has been introduced so that the financial penalty for non-compliance is now between one and three times the deposit.

It remains to be seen whether the Tiensia decision will stand and that a landlord can still fully protect themselves by registering a deposit before the final hearing for the matter.  However, the clear message for landlords must be to ensure that the deposit is protected and the tenant is properly informed of its whereabouts or face the consequences!

The Department for Communities and Local Government FAQ is published here.

If you would like more information or advice relating to a specific matter, please do not hesitate to contact Chris Alexander on 01727 798042 or by email chris.alexander@salaw.com or any member of the Property Litigation Team.

© SA LAW 2012
Every care is taken in the preparation of our articles. However, no responsibility can be accepted to any person who acts on the basis of information contained in them. You are recommended to obtain specific advice in respect of individual case.

Given the subject matter, the case seems sure to be in the headlines until it is resolved. However, the legal difficulties in bringing a claim over ideas for shows should not be underestimated. Copyright infringement applies not to ideas themselves, but to the tangible expression of ideas – something the Americans call the idea/expression dichotomy. In the past, only highly developed ideas – such as preliminary drafts of final works – have been found to be protected in this way.

This issue has put paid to many cases of copyright infringement – among the most famous being the case over the Da Vinci Code, and the plot elements its author had borrowed from an earlier work called the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

Turning to TV shows, the classic case on copyright infringement is Green v NZ Broadcasting Corporation [1989] 2 All ER 1046. In that case, Hughie Green objected to a copy of his ‘Opportunity Knocks’ show being aired in New Zealand. However, the elements he alleged were copied were the title, certain catch phrases and other practices in relation to the show. The Privy Council held this could not be breach of copyright, and TV show producers have rarely relied on copyright ever since.

In confidentiality however, the picture is quite different. TV shows are frequently protected by the use of ‘production bibles’, supplied under confidentiality agreements, containing the sort of know-how that goes into the show but cannot be readily identified by watching it. This makes it hard for copycat shows to air without obtaining the confidential information and ending up on the wrong side of the law.

Indeed, before the show is first aired, confidentiality can offer still greater protection. The ideas, characters, format and flavour of the show are not yet in the public domain, and can all be covered by well drafted confidentiality agreements. This is certainly the route that any budding TV show producer would be advised to go down.

Contact Us
For further information or to discuss a particular matter or situation in more detail, contact Nathanael Young at our St Albans office by email at nathanael.young@salaw.com or on 01727 798000.

© SA LAW 2012
Every care is taken in the preparation of our articles. However, no responsibility can be accepted to any person who acts on the basis of information contained in them. You are recommended to obtain specific advice in respect of individual cases.

It is understood that the move into Administration, will result in the immediate closure of 277 of GAME Group’s 609 stores in the UK and Ireland. It is unclear at this stage how the Group’s operations across Continental Europe (where it boasts a further 678 stores) will be affected. On the personnel side, it is anticipated that the store closures in the UK and Ireland will result in an excess of 2,000 employees being made redundant this week.

The causes of GAME Group’s move into Administration are multifaceted. As demonstrated by the geographic coverage of its operation, GAME Group had pursued an ambitious, fast paced international expansion, which in turn generated high fixed costs and stretched working capital arrangements. Poor trading over the 2011/12 period and the industry-wide factor of profits being undercut by online retailers, meant that such overheads and working capital arrangement became unsustainable. When suppliers, notably EA Sports stopped supplying its top / newest titles to GAME and with the Group’s shares being suspended on the London Stock Exchange last week, the slide into Administration became inevitable.

The Administrators are reported as wanting to sell GAME as a going concern, believing the business to retain value and on the basis that despite the seeming exodus to online retailing, “there is room for a specialist game retailer in the territories in which [GAME] operates,” (Matt Jervis). Private Equity House, OpCapita, has been touted as a possible buyer. The Landlords of those GAME stores that will remain open however will need to be wary, as recent administrations in the retail sector, have lead to widespread concerns over aggressive negotiating tactics from buyers seeking rent free periods and rent reductions.

Ben Ashworth is a Commercial Dispute Resolution Solicitor specialising in Debt Recovery.

As with many recent libel actions, it all started on Twitter. In this case, the offending tweet was posted by Lalit Modi, former chairman of the Indian Premier League, accusing Cairns of involvement in match fixing.

The tweet was soon posted on Cricinfo, a cricketing website with a worldwide audience. After Cairns objected, Cricinfo swiftly made peace – they withdrew the report, apologised and paid damages.

Modi took a different route. He defended on the ground of justification, calling evidence from a number of Cairns’s team mates in an effort to show the allegations were true.

In his judgment however, Mr Justice Bean was scathing about the reliability of some of Mr Modi’s witnesses, and accepted Mr Cairns evidence, noting he had emerged ‘essentially unscathed’ from prolonged questioning.

In a particularly interesting move, the judge then ruled that damages would be increased from £75,000 to £90,000 in view of the ‘sustained and aggressive’ attack on Mr Cairns by the Mr Modi’s lawyers. Apparently the words ‘liar’, ‘lie’ and ‘lies’ were used 24 times in Modi’s barrister’s closing speech.

The case is yet another reminder of the dangers of careless tweets. It is also a reminder of the dangers of trying to justify allegations in libel cases. Although the defendant only needs to prove on the balance of probabilities that they are true, not all attempts at justification survive the intense scrutiny of trial. When they go wrong, they can then lead to additional damages, and certainly far more costs than a quick early settlement.

It seems that the damages awarded may yet be the subject of an appeal. However, the principle that vindictive behaviour can aggravate damages is a long standing one. Defendants to libel trials should be warned: justification is not for the faint-hearted, nor for those without the greatest confidence in their evidence.

Please contact one of our team if you are personally attending the conference or know someone who is and would like to meet up for a coffee/beer, etc.

With slightly more positive economic news over the past month, we very much hope to spot the first green shoots of recovery in the property sector!

SA Law are proud sponsors of the ‘Success Through People’ category in the Business Excellence Awards 2012. Entering your company is a fantastic opportunity to showcase the success of your workforce.
As businesses have faced testing times for a number of years, the people behind the company become a driving force, and there has never been a better time to celebrate and reward the teams of people who truly make your business what it is.
As a firm of Solicitors who have a large Employment Team, we understand the importance of protecting your employees and promoting their best interest to ensure loyalty and a dynamic working environment.

SA Law’s Managing Partner Steve Ryan comments “People are a businesses greatest asset and maximising their participation at all levels is the driving force of any great organisation, regardless of its size. As a firm who truly values its staff’s commitment, we are looking forward to meeting companies who share our values and hearing their success stories.”

Two ‘Success Through People’ award entrants who feel their companies have got what it takes are multi-media agency Clock limited and US founded manufacturers Swagelok London.

Clock – Clock is an award-winning digital agency, with a unique combination of marketing, design and technology talent. The agency work with some of the biggest and most recognisable brands in the world, including the BBC, Channel 4 and News International, as well the likes of Eddie Izzard and Saracens Rugby Club, among others.

“We entered the Business Excellence awards for a variety of reasons” Says Sam Fresco, Marketing Executive at Clock. ”First, we strive to recruit and retain the very best staff. In return, we issue a copy of our ‘Little Book of Benefits’ to the whole team, including benefits such as ‘early finish Fridays’, flexible working hours, a remote-working policy, free hosting for private projects and a personal concierge service.
So, for us, awards are a great way of getting a credibility check, ensuring that what we’re doing is truly the best in breed and not just what we think!

Swagelok -  is a major designer, manufacturer, and provider of high-quality fluid system products, assemblies, and services. The components manufactured and the services  provided help make our customers successful and are often critical to the safety of those who work in high-risk environments. Those environments include power generation, oil and gas production, chemical processing, biopharmaceutical production, research, and semiconductor manufacturing, among others.

The operation in Kings Langley is one of a dedicated network of authorized Swagelok sales and service centres operating in 56 countries. These centres deliver fluid system knowledge, products, and services tailored to the local market.  From Kings Langley, Swagelok services customers in areas as diverse as West Africa and the former Soviet Union . The company offers products and expertise anywhere safety and the environment are important.

How to enter

The panel of Awards judges will be looking for evidence of compelling people strategies and performance as well as the impact of training and incentives on both staff and the business commercially. It is not too late to enter your business into the Business Excellence Awards 2012, apply online now at www.bea2012.co.uk

Entry to these prestigious awards is free and is open to organisations of all sizes and individuals – regardless of industry or sector. If you are based in South Hertfordshire, South Buckinghamshire, North London or North West London, you are eligible to showcase your talent and success to our panel of judges.

Networking Opportunity

SA Law looks forward to welcoming all award applicants to an evening event at the SA Law offices in St Albans on 2nd April. The event will give applicants a chance to meet (and eye up!) their competitors and judges alike. For further information please contact Victoria Thomson 01727 798000.

Trainees are free to choose their own team challenge that will benefit a group within our local community. The target for each Trainee team is to contribute at least £5000 in either volunteered time or money raised for the chosen cause.

The Trainees will be actively supported by all members of the firm.

At SA Law, we believe that being a good corporate organisation in the community, conducting business in an ethical way and supporting voluntary and philanthropic actions is imperative. This is an ethos that we instill across our activities and amongst our staff.

We will keep you updated with our trainees progress and hope you will join us in supporting them.

For more information about the SA Law Trainee Community Challenge, contact CSR Chair Leyla Fuad or Training Principal Terence Ritchie.

To find out more about SA Law in the community, click here.