tWENTY YEARS OF THE CIVIL PROCEDURE RULES: ALL THAT TIME AND THEY HAVE MADE FEW FRIENDS

2 Responses

1. 

   Simon Dewsbury · April 25, 2019 at 14:24:42 · →

   Pluses include witness statements, meetings of experts and jsms. We forget about the quiet successes. But I agree with all the other criticisms.
   Case management by judges gives power without responsibility and thus was a foreseeable folly from the start.
   We had a directions hearing before a senior DJ last week and in accordance with the new directive had prepared double sided bundles. Counsel’s note of the hearing informed us that this upset the DJ, who ‘hated double sided’ and was only pacified when providedo with counsel’so own (single sided) set!

2. 

   David Laws · April 25, 2019 at 21:36:57 · →

   As an avid Antipodean reader of your blog who works within a version of the Woolfe reforms, I marvel at the sheer volume of counter-productive, bureaucratic bumpf and box-ticking you poor devils have to battle through before you even get to put your case to the Court !
   It really seems to me that what may well have begun as a well-intentioned attempt to spoon-feed Judges and/ or force a certain type of lawyer to actually think about what they were doing, has tripped over itself very badly … to the substantial financial cost of litigants, the reputation of the profession and the ability of Judges to do their real jobs effectively and efficiently.
   Perhaps I’ve been around too long, but I would much prefer to trust and engage with Bench praying an exercise of judicial discretion than wave a rule book (put together by a navel-gazing apparatchik) under a Judge’s nose telling them this or that is what they must do.

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