Mike Willis & Naomi Park hope Jackson LJ’s drive for costs reform will encourage leaner & cleaner procedures
The procedural steps and options for reform being contemplated and examined by Lord Justice Jackson, as part of his wide-ranging review of costs in civil litigation, merit careful reflection by all legal professional advisers in civil contentious business. This is not only for their practical implications if procedural rules are relaxed or altered, but also for the new or additional civil liability risks and dilemmas they may create.
Two areas most prominently in need of re-examination and prospective reform, and illustrative of the problems, are:
pre-action procedures, now well embedded since the 1999 Woolf reforms; and
disclosure of evidence, where the proliferation of electronic records in place of paper documents has created many legal and disciplinary, as well as practical, problems.
Pre-action costs
Lord Justice Jackson has given some space in his preliminary report to exploring how and why pre-action costs are incurred and the devices currently available to parties to keep them in check. There is
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