New beginnings—or old history? Diane Parker examines the recent reforms to civil proceedings
As litigators digest the Court of Appeal’s cost budgeting decision in Mitchell, it is interesting to look back at the course of civil proceedings over the last 20 or so years that I have been in practice.
CPR
There is no doubt that the introduction of the Civil Procedure Rules, otherwise known as the Woolf reforms, represented a seismic shift in the conduct of litigation in England and Wales—and can be likened to the courts requiring the parties to litigation to come of age.
By passing responsibility for conducting litigation in a mature way to the parties the courts transferred behaviour from the nursery into adulthood.
A stark example of this can be seen in relation to CPR 32.10—which states that a party that fails to file a witness statement in accordance with the directions must seek the permission of the court to rely on that evidence. This is not a new rule, but who, before this year,
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