Civil procedure

The failure to acknowledge service in accordance with CPR 10.3 was to be regarded as a non-compliance with the rules, giving rise to the sanction of a possible default judgment. CPR 13.3, by its express reference to the court’s power to impose conditions, invited the court to take account of the possibility that a conditional order might be appropriate. The conditions which might be appropriate might vary widely from case to case, although one obvious possibility was to require the defendant to provide security for some or all of the claimant’s claim. That would often be appropriate, particularly in a case where the defendant’s merits were thin, where a judgment might be difficult to enforce, or where there was some reason to suppose that the defendant had failed to comply with his obligations in the past, for example by failing to pay his solicitors’ fees. As the possibility that conditions might be attached to any order