BASIC PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMS

Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) is the new procedural code, which was enacted in 1998 and revoked the Rules of the Supreme Court with effect from 26 April 1999. The Rules, a result of the reforms proposed by Lord Woolf’s Access to Justice (Final Report) 1996, now govern proceedings in the civil cases of the Court of Appeal (Civil Division), the High Court, and the county courts. The Civil Procedure Rules were designed to improve access to justice by making legal proceedings cheaper, quicker, and easier to understand for non-lawyers. Unlike the previous rules of Civil procedure, the CPR commence with a statement of their Overriding Objective, both to aid in the application of specific provisions and to guide behaviour where no specific rule applies.

The Woolf Interim Report (1995) is a very valuable document in its statement of the objectives of a civil justice system, on the failings of the approach existed before and its radical proposals for reform.

The main idea of the civil procedure reform is to render civil justice system more efficient, namely to make it less expensive and more rapid. To achieve these goals it was proposed to shift away from the adversarial culture to judicial management and to encourage alternative dispute resolution (ADR).

The proposals centred on four strategies or principles:

(1) greater judicial management of the process including, notably, tighter and properly enforced timetables and a greater control on discovery and the use of expert evidence (both of which have an escalating effect on costs);

(2) the allocation of different types of cases, normally determinable according to the amounts at stake² in the disputes, to different sets of management rules;

(3) the encouragement of early settlements and resort to ADR procedures;

(4) a greater transparency of legal costs.

Thus the main proposals envisaged a fundamental shift along the spectrum of judicial culture, away from a purer adversarial approach to a more inquisitorial approach. The Rules in fact made radical changes to civil process of the correspondent courts. Under the new regime the judge becomes a case manager. The court sets a timetable for litigation, with the parties being under an obligation to the court to adhere to timescales which control the progress of the case. Procedure rules are supplemented by detailed instructions made by the judge which support the rules, known as practice directions, and pre-action protocols.

Pre-action protocols were introduced³ after the reform in 1999 to speed up the early parts of the litigation process. Pre-action protocols encourage greater contact between the parties at the earliest possible opportunity in order to encourage better and earlier exchange of information with a view to⁴ fair and early settlement of claims. Pre-action protocols can be enforced⁵ by the court and are also seen as an aspect of the courts’ new responsibility of case-management under the Civil Procedure Rules.

II. DEVELOPMENT

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