Talkback: Woolf's expensive legacy
Legal Week reports
June 14, 2006 at 08:03 PM
4 minute read
Sir Hugh Laddie likened the English civil justice system to a Rolls-Royce – high in quality but too expensive. ( Legal Week, 25 May; Top lawyers back Laddie costs salvo, 8 June). His argument is that Lord Woolf's reforms did not go far enough and, in particular, that we should consider abandoning the adversarial system in favour of an inquisitorial system, such as those which prevail in Germany and France.
I think this would be a mistake. Not only would it be counter-cultural, but we would no longer have a business-friendly system that achieves a high level of settlements and that many foreign companies are prepared to submit to.
However, that does not mean that the rise in costs cannot be reversed by a greater understanding of what has caused it. The problem with the Woolf process was that there was no proper debate about whether the proposed reforms would achieve their laudable aims in practice, at least in commercial cases. There was also a concern that anyone who criticised reforms would be seen to be merely protecting a vested interest. Without a robust debate or a pilot scheme to test the reforms in practice, it is perhaps not surprising that the reforms have had a serious unintended impact on costs.
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