LITIGATION: lack of finance for vital case-handling software scuppers long-term reforms

Obsessive litigants, litigants in person and a lack of finance for IT modernisation are burdening the Court of Appeal, top judges warned last week.

Writing in the court's civil division annual review for 2002-2003, the Master of the Rolls, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, said there has been a significant increase of obsessive litigants who are 'determined to leave no procedural stone unturned, regardless of whether they have any arguable ground of appeal'.

He said that 40% of all applications for permission to appeal are made by litigants in person, 'of whom only one-tenth can demonstrate that they have arguable grounds'.

His comments were echoed by the Court of Appeal's vice-president - Lord Justice Brooke - who said litigants in person with hopeless cases are taking up court time 'on a scale which we simply lack the resources to handle'.

Both senior judges lambasted the response of litigants in person to the recent case of Taylor v Lawrence, which established the Court of Appeal's residual power to reopen its decisions in wholly exceptional cases.

Lord Phillips said: 'Groundless applications under Taylor v Lawrence are flooding in at the rate of 200 a year.'

Lord Justice Brooke rounded on poor funding, saying lack of money prevented the court receiving vital case-handling software.

He said: 'If we cannot achieve effective long-term reforms to our arrangements during the next three years, such as befit a court of this importance, I feel I will have failed in my job.'

Elsewhere in the report, Lord Phillips thanked solicitors' firms for assisting the court's judicial assistant scheme, but criticised the bar for seeming 'less ready to follow this example'.

He said that the take-up of mediation remained 'disappointingly low'.

He added: 'We intend to go on studying what more might be done to save those who arrive in our court from the very high expense of contested litigation when mediation might well provide a satisfactory consensual solution.'

The Court of Appeal disposed of 1,296 claims last year, down from 1,415 in 2001/2002; the number of applications for permission to appeal rose slightly to 2,499, as did the number appeals filed, at 1,274.

See [2004] Gazette, 22 January, 12

Jeremy Fleming