Singapore: In certain breach of contract cases, the actions taken by the aggrieved party in mitigating its losses may have resulted in a sufficiently large pecuniary benefit that arguably eclipses the losses it had purportedly suffered in the first place. The question in such cases is whether the pecuniary benefit to the aggrieved party should be taken into account by the Court when assessing damages against the defaulting party. The term “over-mitigation” refers to this legal conundrum. In this article, we will consider the question of whether and if so, when the Court should give credit to the defaulting party for the aggrieved party’s over-mitigation in assessing damages against the defaulting party. Although our focus will be on lease agreements, the principles discussed in this article may be of broader application to other forms of contract.
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