Litigation boutique Stewarts Law won a major victory against Linklaters in the Court of Appeal yesterday. Levicom, a Baltic telecoms company, sued Linklaters, its former solicitors, for around $55 million (£37 million) for allegedly providing careless and unrealistic advice in a dispute with with telecoms company Tele2 AB, a Swedish rival in 2001.

In the original judgement, the judge held that “the Defendants, Linklaters, had negligently advised the Appellants, but that the Appellants had suffered no damage in consequence of that negligence. He awarded them nominal damages in the sum of £5, and they were ordered to pay the Defendants’ costs.”

So, having previously seen the pay out limited to a fiver, there will be some sweaty palms at Linklaters this morning.

On appeal it was concluded that, “When a solicitor gives advice that his client has a strong case to start litigation rather than settle and the client then does just that, the normal inference is that the advice is causative. Of course the inference is rebuttable – it may be possible to show that the client would have gone ahead willy-nilly. But that was certainly not shown on the evidence here. The Judge should have approached the case on the basis that the evidential burden had shifted to Linklaters to prove that its advice was not causative. Such an approach would surely have led him to a different result.”

Read the full judgement here.