Amtrust Specialty (formerly Amtrust Europe) v Endurance Worldwide Insurance (trading as Sompo International) [2025] EWCA Civ 755 stemmed from a larger ongoing dispute between the two insurers over liability following the failure of about 10,000 legal claims. The solicitors running the claims, Pure Legal and High Street Solicitors, both went into administration.
A five-day trial of preliminary issues in that dispute is scheduled for November.
After-the-event insurer AmTrust sought disclosure of correspondence between professional indemnity insurer Sompo and the two law firms for a period of five months before they signed their contracts. At a case management conference, the judge refused on the basis he was sceptical as to the relevance of the material to the issues at trial.
AmTrust contended the judge erred in three ways—he failed to adopt the correct approach in his decision; he reached the wrong conclusion on relevance; and he adopted the wrong approach at the case management conference by making a final decision on relevance.
Sompo disputed this version of events.
Delivering the main judgment in the Court of Appeal, Lady Justice Asplin said: ‘There is no threshold test of relevance... It seems to me that in this case too much emphasis has been placed upon an assumption that there is a minimum threshold of likelihood of the documents being relevant when the degree of likelihood is one factor to be taken into account.’
Asplin LJ said the judge ‘pre-empted the trial judge and restricted the scope of the argument available to AmTrust at the trial of the preliminary issues.
‘It is for the trial judge to decide whether documentation referred to as being incorporated in the policies is relevant to the proper construction of the insuring clause.’
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