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I am not sure what Jackson is talking about when he refers to 'uncontrolled litigation costs'. The mechanisms for controlling litigation costs have existed for the whole of my (long) career. The first job I had to learn back in 1967 was taxation of costs. Bill preparation and taxation was a rigorous process which was not to be taken lightly. It may be that increased pressure on limited judicial time (which resulted in one DJ of my acquaintance describing the average bill as taking only 90 seconds of his time) has reduced the effectiveness of this process but that is hardly a problem capable of remedy in the way Jackson decided. The current system imposes a far greater burden on the judiciary that did a rigorous application of the taxation, now assessment procedure at the end of a case, particularly since that procedure is still necessary in any event.

Deciding in advance what the costs will be must be less exact that deciding post trial etc. what they should be. His problem could have been solved by empowering the assessment process.

His remark that litigation costs budgeting "is amenable to sensible budgeting and such budgeting is very much in the public interest" is fine as a sound bite but nonsense in the real world. As a former barrister he will have had little or no experience of the belligerently unreasonable defendant whose behaviour destroys any prediction of what the costs will be.

The parties will prepare their costs budgets on the assumption that the defendant will behave within the limits of normality. If the budget is prepared on the assumption that the defendant will be unreasonable (such as might be the case when suing the NHS or any other branch of government) the DJ will, almost certainly criticise the budget as unreasonable itself. Move a few months down the line and the defendant has, as expected been unreasonable. Now another budget has to be prepared along with another argument to support it.

How is this better that a robust assessment process where assessing judges had the training to understand what is reasonable and what is not in a claim for costs. Jackson's shibboleth is the desire for foreknowledge, i.e. knowing in advance what the costs will be. He ought to know, from his own fee earning days that sometimes a case will become more complex and require the involvement of much more senior and therefore much more expensive counsel. At the start one hopes that such will be avoided but the arrival of such a complication often does dramatically increase the potential costs and thus would require a variation in the budget. Normally, in the absence of agreement from the defendant, which will not be forthcoming in the current back stabbing environment (which Jackson himself has brought on) an application to the court at some early stage will be needed.

I wonder how many clients would vote for this greater 'certainty' up front in return for the resultant higher costs when the case is over?

Jacksons 'reforms' are merely the opinions of one man, informed no doubt by the opinions of a few more men or women.

Now we have the Civil Justice Council reviewing Jackson. This looks like more of the same, with a few people looking at the responses to the consultation process and then deciding which responses matter and which don't.

Where is the intellectual rigour in all this? A bit of research would not have gone amiss here. Are we doomed to keep on changing things on the basis of the partly informed opinions of a few men like Woolf, Jackson and whichever individual is asked to produce the Civil Justice review report?

FGS, isn't it time you got with the programme boys?