Litigation Trends Survey – The Jackson Effect

The New Law Journal in partnership with LSLA has published their Litigation Trends Survey into the effects of the Jackson Reforms seven months in.

The survey paints a gloomy picture of the impact of many of the key tenets of Lord Justice Jackson’s reforms. Some notable outakes….

On budgeting

  • A significant 69% of respondents thought that budgeting would increase costs with just a fifth (21%) believing costs would go down.

“Budgeting is likely to result in a massive amount of satellite litigation. In litigation other than commodity and factory litigation, ie litigation with any degree of complexity or unpredictability, the likelihood is that budgets will be so hedged around with assumptions that they become worthless.”

On proportionality

  • There are … serious misgivings about the implication that small and medium sized cases are generally less complex than higher value disputes.

“The difficulty is that it is naive to the point of being facile to suggest that because a case is small it is therefore easy. In fact, the reverse may well be the case because transactions involving large sums of money or valuable property are that much more likely to have been considered at the time of the transaction by lawyers on both sides. Smaller transactions are [not] as likely to have involved lawyers.”

On disclosure

  • Serious question marks still exist as to whether all parties to a dispute will share a sufficiently close common desire to limit the scope of disclosure.

“We do not think the new disclosure regime will decrease costs. If anything it will increase them” 

Overall

  • It is abundantly clear … that litigation lawyers, while acknowledging the need for a shake-up of the civil justice system, have deep-rooted concerns regarding how the central themes of the Jackson reforms will play out in practice.

“Both Woolf and Jackson have increased (and accelerated) the overall cost of litigation and that overall cost will have the effect of reducing, not increasing, access to justice.”

Read the full survey.