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I feel really sad about this, am actually typing with a lump in my throat. I remember pre-Woolfe litigation and by and large it was conducted with common sense, more often than not it didn't end up in a court case, and if it did, the Judges were given sufficient information - and even the parties themselves, actually there, standing ready to give evidence, imagine that! - without reams and reams of paper. The fact that the parties were there meant that if anything wasn't clear it could be clarified. Irrelevant documentation wasn't provided, so millions of trees were saved. Costs? Oh, yes. We could have costs as plaintiffs - doesn't that word sound better? - if we could show that what we were claiming was justified. If we'd spent too much time on something, or used the wrong level of lawyer/paralegal/clerk etc, then we got reduced or no costs for that item. The time spent drafting a costs budget these days is far longer than would have been allocated for a final costs hearing in the old days - and with a costs budget you still have to have the costs sorted at the end of the day anyway!

I'm all for improving on something if it's not working, but try as I might I cannot see what was so wrong with the old system that it needed such radical overhaul.

The comments of LCJ that the rules of the CPR are too complex for LIPs is right on the button - and I'll stick my neck out and say they are too complex for most practitioners I'd wager. I agree with a previous comment - I do very little 'real' law these days as most of my time is spent trying to fill forms in properly to avoid them being sent back, and ticking of rules x,y and z where they overlap to ensure that even though rule x says I have to do this, rule y doesn't ask for something more because it's the last Thursday in the month!

When the CPR came into force it looked clean and lean, but how many of us old hands believed it would stay that way? The minute the first bundles of loose leaves arrived at the office with footnotes longer than the actual rules I knew it was the stuff of nightmares.

The plain fact is that the law is not straight forward. If it was, there would not have been any lawyers in the first place. If it was simply a case of fact against fact, there would be no need for interpretation, no need for advice. But given that human beings are wily creatures, no two sets of facts will ever be the same as we have imaginative ways of using the wonderful words we have devised since we first left the caves in such a way that context will always play a part in how the facts come across. We are not computers. We don't deal in pure facts like binary code, it is how the facts are presented that matter to us. So, can it really be the case that lawyers have no worth? We are wordsmiths, pure and simple, we learn what is needed to persuade another that what we present is the irrefutable fact, and therefore it will be found in our favour. On top of that, we are raising a generation of 'text-speak' children who will know no better than to complete a form in the same ilk. Will that be sufficient to persuade a final arbiter that their 'facts' are correct?

I truly used to love doing this job. Now I just do it because it's too late for me to retrain in another field. Each time somebody else says that we as a profession are to blame, or that we are greedy, or that we run roughshod over the people we are trying to help, I despair. I have no self-worth now for my career. It has been beaten out of me. I would rather be stacking shelves in Tesco and going home without having to think about tomorrow's cases/appointments/court hearings/documents and worrying myself to sleep. But that would represent the final capitulation, so I find the little fight left in me to carry on another day. Just barely.