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Funny how the bar is miraculously spared the grief isn't it? When was the last time you saw a counsel's fee slashed on assessment, even whopping brief fees for silks. They also don't have to cope with the quagmire of the ludicrously-evolved and flatulently overweight CPR on a daily basis. Judges will continue to criticise solicitors who make small errors under increasing pressure and ever tightening margins, while the court charges the earth, and increasingly so, for a hopelessly sub-standard 'service' in most cases. We have long since reached the stage where there is no true access to justice, except obviously for the wealthy or insured; and any judge, of whatever seniority, who tries to elide or euphemise this irrefutable fact (not opinion) does rather tend to encourage speculation that a political rather than truly independent stance is involved. And, if we're talking about increased 'efficiency', the CPR or other binding measures need to impose an obligation on judges to deliver written judgment a maximum of 4 weeks after trials lasting 1 week or less, with full reimbursement of court fees to the parties if they fail to do so, even by 1 day (with relief from sanctions on the same basis as solicitors). Was that a pig I just saw fly past the window? "Entertaining and stylish judgments" - quite some reassurance to be had from that, obviously, and there speaks a judge who well and truly has no conception at all of what it is like for the average business or perosn engaged in litigation, which is, quite understandably, financially and personally terrifying for most of them. But there again, why would he be expected to ... as a multi-millionaire who, when a silk, would have earned over 100x the national average annual wage and could, with some alacrity, afford to have his daily papers ironed by the senior partner of a Magic Circle firm at £1,000 per hr (and good luck to them, by the way, it's a free market).

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