Costs reforms post-Jackson to remain a priority

Civil costs reform will continue post-Jackson as a ‘very high priority’, the Master of the Rolls has said.

Lord Justice Jackson, architect of the far-reaching costs and case management reforms introduced in April 2013 by LASPO (the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012), retired this month.

Delivering the Conkerton Memorial Lecture in Liverpool last week, ‘Civil justice after Jackson’, however, Sir Terence Etherton MR took the opportunity to outline potential future reforms. Civil Justice Council (CJC) working parties are due to make recommendations late this year on fixed recoverable costs for clinical negligence claims valued up to £25,000, and in July on mandatory pre-action alternative dispute resolution. A third CJC working party is investigating whether more use could be made of before-the-event (BTE) legal insurance, he said.

Elsewhere, Lady Justice Gloster is chairing a working group on disclosure, the cost of which remains ‘disproportionately high’, Sir Terence said, and a two-year pilot of the group’s proposals may start in the spring.

However, the biggest justice reform will be digital, he said. The proposed single online court encompassing civil, family and tribunal claims with common procedural rules requires primary legislation, which the government has not brought forward.

‘What is now envisaged is that the separate jurisdictions will remain but be accessed via a single digital platform,’ he said. 

‘There is still to be a new rules committee for online court claims, the online procedure rules committee, whose purpose will be to formulate new rules specifically applicable to online dispute resolution, with an emphasis on simplicity of language appropriate for litigants-in-person and so far as possible common rules for all three jurisdictions.’