So now it is to be Woolf! This time around the position is far less clear than with previous reviews and commissions.

We have had no proper press release: just news items emerging in the press, almost as leaks.It appears, however, that Lord Mackay asked Lord Woolf to conduct an in-depth review and recommend changes to make civil justice more accessible to the public and that the Lord Chancellor's Department will provide the secretariat.

It appears there may be a committee of experts.

Lord Woolf is expected to hold public meetings throughout the land and to take about two years to complete the review.However, much is unstated.

We do not know, for example, who chooses the experts, whether Lord Woolf's judicial duties are to be suspended or whether there is to be a draft report on which the profession and public may comment.

Most importantly, we do not know the exact terms of reference, if there are any, and in particular the extent to which cost and delay must be reduced to satisfy the public need.The question lawyers must be asking is whether the review has any better prospect of success than its predecessors.The Civil Justice Review was set up in 1985 to propose procedural reforms to reduce 'cost, delay and complexity'.

The result, after three years, mountains of paper, substantial amounts of 'consultation' time and public money can only be described, so far as cost is concerned, as a mouse.

By then the Lord Chancellor was Lord Mackay, who considered more was required and, after a set of hotly debated green papers, put through the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990 as his contribution to the ills of the system.

Despite all this effort, the impact on cost will be minimal in cases of any real importance.There were only two really novel developments, both highly dubious.

One, opening the High Court to solicitor advocates, stands, if it is not a flop, to destroy the Bar and with it the unique efficiency and integrity of British ivil justice.

T he other, permitting claimants to be financed on a no-win, no-fee basis, stands to become a licence for unscrupulous practitioners to print money at their clients' expense.What all this activity told us by implication was that litigation cost is irreducible.

The fact was openly acknowledged by Richard White, the senior civil servant on the Civil Justice Review, as long ago as 1986 when he indicated to the Torquay litigation conference, well before the review's report came out, that: 'He had come to the conclusion that changes in civil procedure would not make a major contribution to saving costs,' ([1986] Gazette, 19 November, 3478).

Lawyers needed no commission to tell them this.

The fact that Lord Mackay and (one assumes) Lord Woolf now seem to think differently is not a little disconcerting.Lord Woolf already has many ideas to consider, apparently all procedural, but only the most confirmed optimist will expect them to defeat the cost problem.

Some of the ideas should help with the smaller disputes; some seem unrealistic.

For example, the main flavour of the month is monitoring, but with about 30,000 new seriously disputed cases every year of Queen's Bench (former) competence - not to mention all the other litigation - effective monitoring is light years beyond the state's resources.

Pressure from lower tier judges to settle is more likely than not to fall on deaf ears or create confusion, misunderstandings and resentment.

It is as hazardous to combine the inquisitorial and adversarial systems as to have two masters of a ship.Setting cost ceilings at the beginning of a case will be good for the ouija board makers but the only practical effect will be to re-allocate the burden of costs above the set ceiling from an 'event' basis to an 'each pay his own' basis.

The rich will be even more advantaged and (as we know from the USA, where each party bears its own costs) litigation will flourish.

Compulsory ADR has too many things against it.The main trouble, of course, is that the required cost reduction must now be massive, approaching 75% or even more in some cases, if it is to make any real difference.

Nothing so far suggested by Lord Woolf, or anyone else for that matter, is remotely within striking distance of producing results of this order.Delay is more tractable, and reducing it has populist appeal but there is a serious downside as reducing delay increases cost.

Suppose, for example, that a litigator is required to reduce his average case disposal rate from three years to one year.

The extra staff required will increase the cost to his firm by factor three.

However, the inflow of new cases will remain constant.

Result: the firm must treble its charges or close its litigation department.All of which highlights the inaptness of turning problems of this sort over to academics, the former chairman of ICI, the Lord Chancellor's Department, top barristers or even an outstanding law lord.

Litigation cost and delay and the solvency of litigation solicitors are causally connected.

If Lord Mackay really wants to know what procedural changes will slash litigation costs and delay to acceptable levels without bankrupting the profession, he should brief a top solicitor having litigation and commercial experience to produce the answer, paying for the advice on a no-win, no-fee basis.

He will find no takers because the mission is impossible.Furthermore, if by some miraculous means the cost of litigation could be reduced to levels acceptable to the general public, the state could never hope to handle the ensuing trial explosion, w hich by extrapolation from known legal aid data could be of an order of 3000%.The solution to the problems of cost and delay cannot be found in procedural reform but must lie in producing measures to contain its adversarial nature and help finance cases that cannot be settled.

These are the realities which Lord Mackay should have asked Lord Woolf to address.