Thomas Yarrow

Cross-border litigation forms a core area of Thomas’s practice. Before coming to the Bar, Thomas worked as a Civil Servant, including as a policy advisor at the Brexit Department. His former experience gives him an encyclopaedic knowledge of legislation, treaties and international conventions in the field of Private International Law, which he has applied to his cross-border practice, building a reputation as a go-to barrister for complex questions of jurisdiction and applicable law. He wrote the relevant chapter on such in the latest edition of the leading practitioner textbook, Saggerson on Travel Law and Litigation. His practice spans cross-border personal injury, commercial disputes and consumer protection.

Cross-border Personal Injury

Thomas has a strong day-to-day practice assisting claimants and defendants in personal injury cases with a foreign nexus, with extensive experience of cases brought under the Package Travel Regulations both 1992 and 2018; cases requiring proof of local standards as distinct from foreign law; cases under the Athens or Montreal Conventions; cases with uneasy tensions between the lex causi and the lex fori (for instance – Spanish penalty interest); cases with conflicts of law falling outside the Rome I and Rome II Conventions (for instance where the allegations concern acta iure imperii); and cases involving allegations of clinical negligence abroad.

Recent cases include:

• The case of a Gibraltar Service Police officer injured in the course of working for the Ministry of Defence in Gibraltar.
• Acting as junior to Sarah Prager KC in a case involving an English pilot injured in China while in transit to an airport under contract with a Chinese airline.
• The case of a woman injured on holiday in Spain, with a key issue being a dispute between experts on either side concerning interpretation of the Spanish Technical Building Code.

Cross-border Consumer Protection

Thomas’s cross-border practice includes consumer contract disputes, particularly and more recently claims arising out of the Covid-19 pandemic raising issues under the Denied Boarding Regulation and/or the Package Travel Regulations. He is well-versed in handling claims under section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974

Recent matters have included:

• Providing advice to a market watchdog as junior to Sarah Prager KC on the effect on consumers of the standard Terms and Conditions and operating practices of a number of commercial airlines, examining whether such might constitute unfair terms on practices under consumer protection legislation.
• Acting as junior to Sarah Prager KC in Sherman v Reader Offers Ltd [2024] EWCA Civ 412, a case involving alterations to a packaged cruise. Central issues were: the effect of the requirements of the Package Travel Regulations (in this case 1992) on a classical analysis of formation of contract; the meaning of ‘constrained to alter’ in regulation 12 and the so-called ‘flicker of hope’ test; and the interpretation of ‘unforeseeable consequences’ in regulation 15 in the context of highly unpredictable phenomena such as formation and location of sea ice.
• Successfully acting for a travel agent in a holiday refund claim where the agent had quoted a mistaken (lower) price to the consumer; only realising the error after the purported booking had been completed. Issues concerned the doctrine of unilateral mistake, and the current uneasy position in the law as to whether actual knowledge of the mistake on the part of the offeree is needed or whether knowledge can be imputed; and whether the agent’s standard Terms and Conditions which allowed for unilateral post-booking alterations for mistakes was unfair under the Consumer Protection Act 2015.

Cross-border Commercial

Thomas also acts and advises in matters involving of dispute (or potential dispute) between businesses operating in the travel sector, for instance arising out of the indemnity terms between suppliers of holiday services and agents/organisers. He recently acted as junior to Sarah Prager KC in a multimillion claim in unjust enrichment, including allegations of breach of competition law, between an online travel agent and an airline concerning refunds paid to customers arising out of cancelled flights during the Covid-19 pandemic.