Jackson Review findings to be published on 14th January
Lord Justice Jackson's long-awaited review of Civil Litigation Costs will be published 14 January 2010, the Judicial Communications Office has confirmed.
The review, carried out by Lord Justice Jackson, was commissioned by the Master of the Rolls in spring 2009. An interim report was published in May, followed by a consultation period with stakeholders.
The review examines a number of key issues affecting litigation lawyers, in particular the payment of referral fees, the operation of conditional fee arrangements (CFAs) and 'after the event' (ATE) litigation cover, costs-shifting and the cost of e-disclosure. In May this year Justice Jackson admitted that: “These issues are complex and intractable”.
In an earlier preliminary report from May 2009 Justice Jackson gave a sense of where the final report may be going. The earlier report found that although there has been a reduction in cases reaching court since the Woolf Reforms, which stressed the importance of conciliation and mediation, the number of claims or petitions in county court are still huge.
The report notes that in 2007 there were just over 2 million claims in court. A large part of these claims were over small debts and the majority of them were undefended. However, the remaining cases are still significant in number, around 200,000 that were “seriously contested” and created substantial costs. By far the greatest single number of contested claims are for personal injury.
Since the Access to Justice Act 1999 was implemented, public sector bodies and insurance companies have consistently complained that the system of CFAs and ATE which replaced Legal Aid for personal injury was putting an unfair costs burden on personal injury claim defendants.
