Report comment

I was fortunate/unfortunate enough to go to one of the early closed session discussions at the RCJ with Jackson LJ around 10 years ago. He never got to grips with the idea that capping costs or fixing costs simply widened the gap between the sum that the client pays and the sum that it can recover from the other side. His attitude was that Solicitors would just start to charge less to be more competitive. We pointed out that there would be a race to the bottom and that detailed assessment was a way of controlling costs but I do not believe that he understood the concept of inter-partes costs being a contribution to S&C costs. The Jackson Reforms were not about access to justice; they were about stopping the stigma of legal costs rather than confronting it sensibly.