A plaintiff whose pleaded damages claim is bound to fail cannot reformulate its damages on appeal as a basis for remittal where the reformulated claim constitutes a significant departure from the case as pleaded and run at trial. A trial judge has no obligation to search through tendered material not referred to in evidence or submissions to identify a basis for the party's claim. The reasonableness of rejecting a Calderbank offer is assessed as at the date of the offer by reference to the known state of the proceedings, and a claim not then pleaded or contemplated is irrelevant to that assessment.
The full text is available to signed-in members, including the 7 later cases that cite this judgment.