03/02/2020 Reachlocal UK Ltd & Anor v Bennett & Ors [2014] EWHC 3405 (QB) (21 October 2014) 47. However, I must make some discount for Mr Bray's candid acceptance that the impact of defamatory communications was only one of three reasons advanced by customers for resiling from their commitments. I accept that harassment and concerns for confidentiality may have potency as factors in that decision, but it seems to me little more than common sense to suppose that loss of confidence in the honesty and trustworthiness of the first claimant will have been the main factor which led customers to make their decision. In my judgment, it is bound to have been the main factor in the great majority of cases. By contrast, concerns about harassment or about confidentiality seem to me, viewed objectively, to be distinctly less likely to have been causative, and perhaps likely to have been mentioned as a tactful way to explain the decision. It is not possible to be precise. Doing the best I can, I propose to discount the sum claimed by a figure of 20% to allow for those customers who decided not to have further dealings with the first claimant for reasons other than loss of trust in the first claimant by reason of defamatory communications. That produces a discounted figure for future loss of £241,945.42. 48. The first claimant also seeks to recover special damages arising from attempts to mitigate its loss. It is trite law that a claimant must take all reasonable steps to mitigate his loss, and that where he does so, he can recover his loss in doing so, even though the resulting damage might be greater than it would otherwise have been had the mitigating steps not been taken: see for instance McGregor on Damages, 19th ed., para 9-04, 9-05. 49. Mr Bray explained to me the steps which the first claimant has taken in mitigation. Firstly, it offered credits totalling £60,728 to customers who were planning to cancel their campaigns in the light of what they had learned from the defendants, to encourage them to stay. Secondly, it gave refunds to very disgruntled customers who had decided to leave ReachLocal, and whose concerns could not be appeased, to ensure that they left 'happily', as he put it: in other words, the object was to minimise their hostility to the first claimant, in the hope that they could be won back in the future. The cost of those refunds was £146,576. Mr Singla argued that the first claimant had a legitimate interest in keeping customers on good terms with a view to winning them back later, and that for it to do so was no more than reasonable mitigation of its loss. Thirdly, the first claimant employed a public relations consultant to manage the damage to the company's reputation caused by the defendant's activities, at a cost over 12 months of £66,600. 50. The authorities show that the standard of reasonableness to which the victim of loss will be held, in seeking to mitigate, is not a high one. I have in mind the remarks of Lord Macmillan in Banco de Portugal v Waterlow [1932] AC 452 at 506 (spoken in the context of contract, but equally applicable to tort): "Where the sufferer from a breach of contract finds himself in consequence of that breach placed in a position of embarrassment, the measures which he may be driven to adopt in order to extricate himself ought not to be weighed in nice scales at the instance of the party whose breach of contract has occasioned the difficulty. It is often easy after an emergency has passed to criticise the steps which have been taken to meet it, but such criticism does not come well from those who have themselves created the emergency. The law is satisfied if the party placed in a difficult situation by reason of the breach of the duty owed to him has acted reasonably in the adoption of remedial measures and he will not be held disentitled to recover the cost of such measures merely because the party in breach can suggest that other measures less burdensome to him might have been taken." 51. Of course, whether the claimant has in fact acted reasonably is in every case a question of fact, not of law. 52. I have no difficulty in concluding that the sums paid to customers to encourage them to stay, by way of credits, are recoverable as reasonable mitigation. I take the same view of the cost of employing a public relations consultant to undo some of the reputational damage which the first claimant suffered. I am sceptical, however, that the payment of refunds to customers who had made a firm decision to stop doing business with ReachLocal can be characterised as reasonable mitigation of the damage suffered. These were customers who must have been convinced by what they had heard from the defendants, or at least sufficiently concerned by what they had heard, to be unresponsive to the first claimant's www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2014/3405.html 11/14