Show your working

Maths teachers, much to the frustration of their students, always say to ‘show your working’. They mean that it is not enough to get the right answer, you should also show how you reached it.

This is good advice in legal practice as well. Unless they are obvious, conclusions are not convincing. It is the route you take to the conclusion that will persuade others.

Even more than that, it is often hard to remember in detail how you reached a particular conclusion some time later. This is particularly true if, like most tribunal hearings, there are lots of different issues to deal with.

It is particularly important when dealing with schedules of loss. Unless you write things down at the time, it is almost impossible to remember why a particular number is what it is. And raw numbers are not intuitive. Nobody will be able to look at a final figure, say £16,540, and understand immediately where it comes from. For every figure of compensation claimed, you should set out how it was reached.

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