Lord Woolf raps solicitors for CPR failings

Lord Woolf (pictured) has blamed lawyers, the judiciary and government for blunting the impact of his 10-year-old reforms to the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR).

The retired law lord, addressing members of the London Solicitors Litigation Association last week, said lawyers had ‘made an industry’ of some aspects of the reforms which had been designed to speed up the court process.

The Woolf reforms aimed to improve access to justice by cutting the time and cost of litigation. Key reforms included letters before action, mediation instead of litigation, tight case management by trial judges to minimise delays and expense, and state-of-the-art IT.

Woolf went on: ‘Letters before action became an industry in themselves. They were meant to be simple letters outlining the facts of the case, not packed with pre-action disclosures and other contentious matters. They allowed the solicitors’ profession to invent a new profession all for itself.’

He said litigation was intended to be used as a ‘last resort’, but this was ‘not generally the attitude of the profession’. Large City law firms have not worked to reduce fees by going to mediation, he said, but have snared business in the ‘blackmailing situation’ of costly litigation. Woolf said he had been told by one large corporation that the cost of defending litigation was so high that it always settled cases unless there was a public interest reason not to do so.

Woolf also attacked the judiciary for stalling his reforms by not managing cases properly and allowing an ‘encrustation of case upon case’, until the CPR White Book has grown to five volumes. Judges needed to ‘strictly enforce’ the rules, he said, jokingly citing the example of a former chief justice in Singapore who sentenced a time-wasting solicitor to three months in jail.

Woolf’s broadside also targeted the government, which he said 10 years ago failed to deliver on its promise of providing the best IT: ‘But we couldn’t delay the momentum of the reforms and went ahead.’ It seemed unlikely in the present economic climate that the government would make the investment now, he added.

The overriding point of his reforms, Woolf said, was to provide a system ‘capable of evolving to assist the public’. He called upon City law firms, with their reputation for integrity and high professional standards, to embrace any cost-saving procedural changes proposed by Lord Justice Jackson in his upcoming review of litigation costs. He also called on trial judges actively to manage cases from the start, looking at quantum and calculating maximum costs. ‘Because if you can’t afford litigation, then there can be no access to justice,’ he said.