Another step has been taken along the road towards pro-active judging in pre-trial civil litigation.

In an interview on 29 May, Lord Woolf unveiled plans 'to make justice speedier and more affordable for ordinary people'.

Building on the work already done by the 1993 Heilbron committee, the 1988 civil justice review and in the official referees' and Commercial Courts, these plans include the creation of procedural judges who will simplify civil actions, transfer control from the parties to the courts and lay down a timetable for cases to be heard.What all this work has in common is that it is, on the whole, court or court user led.

Court management in this country is developing, as it has done in the USA, on the basis of court users' experience that for whatever reasons, it works.The problem lies in how to define what 'works'.

The usual references are to reducing costs and delay, encouraging settlement or improving the quality of justice; all cited as results which benefit the parties to the litigation.

However, 'justice' is a notoriously undefinable term, and one suspects that there is also a hidden agenda concerning public expenditure: one district judge recently defined the 'overriding duty of the court' as upholding justice and 'to save public funds'.

This impression is furthered by the fact that it is a government inquiry which Lord Woolf is heading.

Do considerations of public expenditure coincide with the drive to improve the service to court users or any other definition of 'justice'?Consider also the desire to reduce costs and delay as balanced against the litigant's desire to be fully prepared and to participate in the proceedings.

A sense of participation may be furthered by having informal procedures: the 'pomp and ceremony' of a courtroom does too much to distance the lay person from his or her dispute, and that formality costs too much and takes too long.However, perceived participation must be balanced against actual participation, which formality is designed to protect in the form of the procedural right to be heard in public with a right of appeal.

Informality may mask coercion or present the court with information pre-trial which might affect its impartiality.Does increased court control over pre-trial civil procedure reduce costs and delay? Empirical research conducted in the USA warns us against generalising.

Timetables tend to increase the disposition rate but efforts to encourage settlement may not.Experience of automatic directions and automatic striking out in the county court have shown that problems can arise when a court imposes timetables without being fully aware of the circumstances of the case.

It is well known that courts often take the view that delay is caused by dilatory or incompetent practitioners, but in intervening between a solicitor and his or her client, the court runs the risk of driving a wedge into a relationship which is the linchpin of adversarial civil procedure.

Court management marks a departure from the adversary model, but should it be to the detriment of solicitor-client relations?Efforts to encourage settlement are also controversial.

Have the parties lost their right to litigate? There are moves afoot to make participation in some form of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) mandatory.

However, even where it remains voluntary there is a fine line between urging the parties to recognise the benefits of settlement and coercing them into accepting it.

Coercion threatens the freedom of the parties' consent upon which depends the legitimacy of settlement as a method of resolving disputes.There is also an old debate surrounding ADR and its secrecy: it deprives society of a precedent and therefore of the opportunity to clarify and determine the standards by which it governs itself.

These arguments turn on different views as to the proper function of a civil justice system: is it simply to resolve peacefully private disputes, or to permit the implementation of public policy?These show that there are a great many considerations to be taken into account before court management can truly be said to 'work'.

The interests of the private parties in reducing costs and delay but in obtaining a fair hearing before a neutral judge are only part of the story and, though it appears that the official referees' and the Commercial Courts have satisfactorily respected those interests, that may be because those courts are made up of judges of a particularly high calibre, and because they have been aware that they are embarking on something new and potentially dangerous.

If court management extends beyond those specialist jurisdictions, research I have conducted suggests practitioners perceive many judges to be lacking in the skills necessary to cope with their new role.

Once court management becomes an established part of civil litigation in this country, it is also possible that standards will drop.The question of what to do about litigation which gives rise to a significant public interest is another problem altogether.

Should the parties be entitled to settle when society would benefit from a precedent or, if we wish to curb public expenditure, should disputants be entitled to utilise public resources where there is no discernible public benefit?These are problems which must be addressed.

Court management represents a departure from a model of civil procedure which we have used for centuries.

Changing that model must entail the identification of what it is we seek from civil justice; how court management can further those goals; and a new training programme to allow judges to adjust to their new role.

The Woolf committee must consider all of these things if it is to fulfil its laudable objectives.