Rowland Williams has asserted: 'So now it is to be Woolf!...We have had no press release: just news items emerging in the press, almost as leaks,' (see 'Mission impossible' [1994] Gazette, 6 July, 2).There has now been a press release.

It is dated 28 March 1994, and the thrust is as simple as it is obvious: access to justice .

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streamlining, speed and less cost.In the heat of the debate which Heilbron/Hodge and Woolf have triggered, sight has perhaps been lost of the reason for excessive cost:-- dispute resolution in the UK is pursued almost exclusively through the courts;-- to access this system of dispute resolution, however large or small the dispute, one has to have recourse to a vast set of complex rules and commentary .

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the Green Book and White Book;-- these rules help to entrench the closed shop of the courts and the legal profession.

Closed shops mean high fees; -- legal fees have traditionally been demand led, and paid by way of an hourly rate irrespective of whether the payer has been the public purse .

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the Legal Aid Board .

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or the commercial client;-- those fees have become so high that no one outside the categories of wealthy corporate client, or those who are legally aided, can realistically afford to litigate to trial;-- demand-led hourly-rate funding makes a file more profitable if more issues are uncovered and researched.Part of the crisis in our system of dispute resolution is that the amount of court business defies the system's ability to cope, resulting in appalling delay.

This is the inevitable result of:-- the huge increase in the money being volunteered to pay lawyers by the LAB and commercial clients;-- the overwhelmingly powerful philosophy that everything is now so very complicated that every possible issue in the case has to be explored;-- the appalling waste of time .

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the time spent creating documents which do not have to exist (the triumph of the photocopier?), reading documents which do not have to be read, investigating issues which do not have to be investigated, litigating in court issues which should never be litigated.

The brains of the most powerful legal minds in the land are atrophying through being reduced to document readers .

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and so frequently irrelevant documents at that; -- the channelling of virtually all dispute resolution through the rigid and restrictive closed shop of the courts.These factors .

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delay and cost .

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bring into focus, by putting the system under excessive strain, the weaknesses which were already present but which had perhaps been camouflaged by terms such as 'honourable profession', 'my learned friend' and 'due process'.

Other industries, confronted with a dramatic increase in consumer demand, rapidly adjust their working practices to meet that demand cost-efficiently.

The insolvency legislation is the stick which beats the market place.

Hence the dramatic increase in the availability of consumer goods and travel, matched by the dramatic drop in the cost of such goods and travel.Why, then, should there be such mental atrophy amongst lawyers particularly if the system of dispute resolution in the UK is to fathom, speedily, the relevant issue.

As Lord Salmon said in his paper, 'Some thoughts on the traditions of the English Bar', delivered on 25 June 1964: 'You must consider all the many points that could be made.

But remember this: in few cases, however complex, is there usually more than one point that matters.

Very seldom are there more than two and never, well hardly ever, more than three.

Discover the points that really matter.

Stick to them and discard the rest.'In a similar vein, Lord Templeman said in Ashmore v Corporation of Lloyd's [1992] 1 WLR 446: 'It is the duty of counsel to assist the judge by simplification and concentration and not to advance a multitude of ingenious arguments in the hope that out of ten bad points the judge will be capable of fashioning a winner.'The need for focus has for too long been honoured in the breach, as evidenced by the market for lever arch files and cases lasting for aeons.However, from 1995, there are to be standard fees in the county court.

If litigators cannot work within a budget, by striking the right issue at the right time, they will rapidly become specialists in insolvency.

Conditional fee agreements are soon to be with us.

Scotland, where they are known as 'speculative agreements', has had them for years.What is this 'no win, no fee' arrangement but the privatisation of the funding of dispute resolution? Privatisation inevitably generates a dramatic reduction of surplus staffing, and a dramatic increase in efficient and cost-effective working practices.Central to the effective operation of a conditional fee agreement is 'risk analysis'.

That risk analysis is now very much easier, because of 'openness'.

This is perhaps best demonstrated by exchange of lay witness evidence certified beforehand as being accurate and true.

The court is no longer the primary fact-finding forum.Once the legal profession can make an informed risk analysis before trial, why should the client or the LAB underwrite the risk of losing? It will be the lawyers who underwrite that risk.

The quality of their risk analysis of the merits of the case will be central to their future solvency.Against that backdrop, Lord Woolf's proposals adopt and refine Parkinson's law, which in this context can now be taken as reading: as to delay: a job takes as long as one has time to do it; as to cost: a job costs as much as one has money to spend on it.These 'laws' require litigators to look at those things that are fundamental to survival, including comprehensive information technology, video conf erencing, training of experts, standardised modules for standard litigation problems, the more focused use of specialist counsel, legal research to facilitate more effective file management and, a priori, a constant striving, from the moment the client comes through the door, for the real issue in the case which matters.Lord Woolf's proposals will have the effect of preserving the solvency of those practitioners who are not frightened of the future and who do not hanker after the past, because they promote the following self-evident truths:-- the successful, ie solvent, litigator in the year 2000 will plan his or her action from the moment the client walks through the door, identifying the primary issues, the relevant lay and expert evidence and the documents to home in on.

He or she will rapidly screen out the rest; -- once orality is reduced to writing, the opportunity to check quality and negligent file handling is brought very sharply into focus.

When litigators sue their colleagues with the vigour with which they now pursue the medical profession, a court-ordained narrowing of issues will be seen as a line of defence against an allegation of incompetent file management; -- court management will enable litigators to work more accurately within the fixed fee budgets to be brought into force in 1995;-- court management will facilitate the clarification of the main issues in the case.

This reduces the exposure of the litigator under a conditional fee agreement to losing a case because of selection of the wrong issue.One celebrated silk said to me recently: 'In any case there are never more than 100 relevant documents .

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and you usually do not get those until half way through the trial.'