The Pros And Cons Of Lord Woolf Reforms

In March 1994, the Lord Chancellor selected Lord Woolf to improve access to justice by reviewing the rules of civil procedure . Into the civil courts of Wales and England, wide-ranging reforms were introduced; new Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) intended to pulverize the problems recognized by Lord Woolf— predominantly the problems of delay, costs and complexity (because of excessive adversarial culture) . The entire ethos of Woolf reforms was focused on promoting settlement between parties at dispute, and avoiding litigation (to curb costs). It is popularly debated that the Woolf reforms were a major success, delivering justice by reducing costs and delays, this paper will examine the validity of these claims.

Woolf report, Chapter 10; propsed

Statistical evaluations, using time-series analysis, concluded on dataset of monthly means over the period of 1997-2003, the outcomes indicated that Post-Woolf reform cases have a positive effect on delay (i.e. it increases delay) . Furthermore, it was found that from 2001 to 2003 the duration of non-litigated cases risen to 80 from 21, whereas the duration of litigated cases subsequently reduced . Upon acceptance, this evidence provides consistency to the story of Woolf reforms having “bought” a reduction in the time span of litigated cases, but at the expense of

An impressionistic evidence is provided in the survey of litigation costs by Professor Hazel Genn. It was determined that the value of claims and costs of prosecution are disproportionate, especially at the monetary baseline; in the cases worth less than £12,500, 31 % of the successful party’s costs were between £10,000-20000, further with a 9% of incurring costs . The figures look bleaker when one considers that half of the cases ended with a consent order and one quarter by judgement. Among claims of value between £12,500 and £25,000, the percentage of claim value range from 41% among personal injury to 96% among Official Referees cases . These figures are representing the costs of winning party, the cases that went to trial, and were settled. Samuel Issacharoff, commented on these figures “the procession costs related to the legal system [i.e. the costs to both sides] surpasses the merits of the issue by ratio of two to one . Furthermore, in statistical evaluation it was derived that prior to 2002, the average cost of resolving litigated cases increased coarsely in proportion to the average costs of resolving non-litigated cases . Nevertheless, the Law Society Woolf Network’s survey 45% of respondents stated that aggregation of costs was a problem