When the Master of the Rolls, Lord Woolf, announced the implementation of his civil procedure rules (CPR) in 1999, it was clear that the man in charge of the biggest shake-up of civil law administration in a century was not going to do things by halves.
The CPR, also known as the Woolf reforms, were aimed at reducing the cost of dispute resolution by speeding up procedures and, through promoting alternative forms of dispute resolution such as mediation, ensuring that fewer claims made it to court.
