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A sea change

07 February 2014 / Nicholas Heaton
Issue: 7593 / Categories: Features , Litigation trends
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 Will Mitchell herald a whole new culture of conducting civil litigation, asks Nicholas Heaton

Commentators on the Court of Appeal’s decision in Mitchell v News Group Newspapers [2013] EWCA Civ 1537, [2013] All ER (D) 314 (Nov) have so far focused on the justice or otherwise of the decision, or on its importance in terms of the rules on costs budgeting. In time, however, the Mitchell decision may be seen as the catalyst for something far more ground-breaking: a whole new culture of conducting civil litigation. The case may allow the Jackson reforms to achieve something that the Woolf reforms did not manage—a more general understanding that the rules are there to be obeyed.

Power of the courts

One of the key innovations in the Woolf reforms was that responsibility and control of litigation would shift from the litigants and their legal advisers to the courts. A range of case management powers was duly included in the new Civil Procedure Rules, the idea being that judges would fix and enforce strict timetables for procedural steps leading

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DWF—19 appointments

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Belfast team bolstered by three senior hires and 16 further appointments

Cadwalader—Andro Atlaga

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Knights—Ella Dodgson & Rebecca Laffan

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Double hire marks launch of family team in Leeds

NEWS
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Small law firms want to embrace technology but feel lost in a maze of jargon, costs and compliance fears, writes Aisling O’Connell of the Solicitors Regulation Authority in this week's NLJ
The Supreme Court issued a landmark judgment in July that overturned the convictions of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, once poster boys of the Libor and Euribor scandal. In NLJ this week, Neil Swift of Peters & Peters considers what the ruling means for financial law enforcement
Charles Pigott of Mills & Reeve reports on Haynes v Thomson, the first judicial application of the Supreme Court’s For Women Scotland ruling in a discrimination claim, in this week's NLJ
Bea Rossetto of the National Pro Bono Centre makes the case for ‘General Practice Pro Bono’—using core legal skills to deliver life-changing support, without the need for niche expertise—in this week's NLJ
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