If you have taken the trolley bus through Stanley Park in Vancouver, you may have noticed a statue that looks pretty much like a mermaid sitting by the waterside. To ensure his small band of tourists did not jump to the wrong conclusions, the friendly trolley driver/tour guide was quick to observe ‘They think it’s a mermaid, but it’s no’ a mermaid’.

Whilst somewhat similar to the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen, he explained it was a statue of a girl in a wet suit. The guide kept repeating the fact that it wasn’t what it appeared to be and somehow managed to hold the interest of his patrons, even though, in the overall scheme of things, no one on the trolley could have cared less if it was a mermaid or not.

By the same token, and to avoid any misunderstandings, this is not a textbook. It does not seek to emulate the styles of the weighty tome that is McLaren from 1912 or the more recent offering from Hastings in 1989. Others will doubtless produce more academic and authoritative works. This is simply, and unashamedly, a handbook written by practitioners for practitioners. We would also be delighted if law students could, as part of their studies, be introduced to some of the topics to give them a head start. All too often, our experience is that junior lawyers have little or no understanding of expenses issues and have no idea where to turn to find out the answers.

We want to provide a readily accessible source of information on what is an ever-changing area of civil practice. We felt there was a need for something that could bring together the old and the new, include extracts from legislation, court rules and judgments where it might be useful to see those set out in the body of the book rather than go hunting for them elsewhere. We wanted to create something that is user friendly. We cannot offer all the answers, not least because the jurisprudence in some areas (such as qualified one-way cost shifting) is so new, there is no precedent, in Scotland.