APPEALS — appeal from Local Court — whether plaintiff should be granted leave to appeal — where the costs of the proceedings are disproportionate to the amount in dispute — where a grant of leave would entail more costs — no issue of principle
Quick Take
1Where the costs already incurred and likely to be incurred on remittal are disproportionate to the modest sum in dispute, that disproportionality alone can make a case an unsuitable candidate for a grant of leave to appeal from the Local Court under s 40 of the Local Court Act 2007 (NSW).
2A trial judge's resolution of conflicting eyewitness accounts by reference to objective evidence and the probabilities objectively ascertained is an entirely conventional fact-finding exercise, not a misapplication of the standard of proof by treating the case as one of rival conjectures.
3An inconsistency between a party's contemporaneous account and their later sworn evidence is a legitimate consideration in assessing credibility, even where the contemporaneous account involved a third-party translation from a language other than English.
