The ancillary relief pilot scheme has been with us for slightly more than three years, and is to go nationwide on 5 June.

For those who have not encountered it, the scheme was a trial of a new procedure for ancillary relief applications, carried out in various selected courts around the country and monitored by researchers.

The results of the research were favourable and the Lord Chancellor has given it his blessing.From June, therefore, it will be pilot no more (or only in the sense that the 'special procedure' is special).

This will be the end of a process that began with a meeting of an ad hoc group under the leadership of Thorpe J (as he then was) in 1992, which was dedicated to improving the system of ancillary relief for the benefit of lawyers and their clients.

(I should declare an interest as a member of that group from an early stage).In a nutshell, the purpose of the new procedure was to bring court case management into ancillary relief; no longer would lawyers be able to run cases at their own pace and inclination, often to the detriment of -- and disastrous cost to -- their clients.A subordinate aim was to standardise procedure.

For many years, district judges around the country have recognised the intricacies of the standard Family Proceedings Rules model (not a great deal different from those of 1857) and devised their own local schemes.

Admirable as many of these may have been, practitioners have suffered from the diversity of approach and it was thought desirable to introduce one national procedure.So how is the pilot scheme different? First, the court remains in control throughout.

When the application is issued, a First Directions Appointment (FDA) is fixed.

This can only be vacated with permission of the court and no case is ever adjourned generally, so the parties always have a date towards which to work.

Every case is timetabled.

The parties as well as their solicitors must attend all hearings.Another big difference relates to discovery of documents.

One of the reasons for the new procedure in the first place was the disquiet caused by several notorious cases in which the lawyers had engaged in a prolonged and horribly expensive process of voluntary discovery, resulting in costs going into six figures.

Thus it is that the rules provide that, once the application is made, there can be no discovery (not even voluntary discovery) without an order of the court.

Much of the time of the FDAs has been taken up in arguments over discovery and questionnaires, though it is to be hoped that after three years the message has sunk in that only necessary and relevant documents and information will be ordered to be supplied.

It is the function of the district judge to identify the corr ect issues and to ensure that they are addressed by the parties.Form E is designed to abolish the narrative affidavit.

Family practi-tioners are familiar with the affidavit of means, which deals in loving detail with everything except means.

These abominations will no longer be possible.

Evidence as to financial matters is given on Form E, which is like a glorified Income Support application form and prescribes the information needed.

The revised Form E, which will be prescribed by the revised Family Proceedings Rules, will require essential documents such as the last three payslips and form P60 (for the employed) or accounts for the last two accounting years (for the self-employed), mortgage statement, bank statements for 12 months and any property valuation obtained within the past six months to be attached.

It is hoped this will speed the process and avoid requests for documents in most cases.Where there is a genuine issue as to, say, contributions or (more rarely) conduct, the court at the FDA may direct the filing of a narrative affidavit limited to that issue.

However, this has only been necessary in a minority of cases.The final innovation is the Financial Dispute Resolution appointment (FDR).

This is normally timed to take place when all the evidence has been exchanged, and the court and the parties are able to see what the case is really about.

The parties are required to make their genuine offers to each other in writing before the hearing and to disclose them to the judge at the hearing.

The hearing is then conducted on a privileged basis, so that the parties can be confident that nothing they say can be repeated at a later date.

It is the function of the court (normally a district judge, but a High Court judge may deal with the FDR in a very complicated matter which would eventually be tried at that level) to help the parties to settle their dispute by eliminating any faIse expectations and giving a general indication of how the court would be likely to approach the particular case and any issues arising from it.

If no settlement is reached, the judge must play no further part in the case and all offers are removed from the court file and returned to the parties.

Where appropriate, the court may treat the FDA as the FDR, which clearly saves time and costs.

Its revised rules encourage this in two ways, by requiring the documents which would be found in the run of the mill case to be attached to the Form E and by requiring the parties to inform each other and the court whether or not they will be in a position to use the FDA for this purpose.In most cases, it should be possible to use the FDA for the FDR, but in some cases involving considerable resources or requiring further investigation it will still be necessary to direct a separate FDR.As has been suggested above, the pilot rules have been considerably amended as a result of the experience of the past three years, and also after recent consultation.

The final version will be published shortly.

At one stage, it was thought that the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) would be specifically incorporated into these rules; but it was recognised that, for example, on the issue of expert evidence, the CPR are inconsistent with existing case law in family law and so this proposal was abandoned.

However, the rules do begin with a statement of an overriding objective which is in distinctly Woolfish terms.

It might be argued that Woolf had learned from family law, and specifically the operation of the pilot scheme, rather than vice versa -- but no matter; the overriding objectiv e perfectly sets out what the scheme is about.

Its advantages are apparent to everyone who has worked within it, and few will mourn the passing of the ancien regime.