By any standards, the past decade has been a tough one for the English Bar. Lord Woolf and his Civil Procedure Rules have cut the number of claims going through the courts; the restructuring of legal aid has devastated the number of personal injury claims; the Office of Fair Trading seems hell-bent on tearing down some of the Bar’s most cherished traditions and the Access to Justice Act has produced a raft of potential competitors in the form of solicitor advocates. But have these changes done any real damage to the commercial and Chancery Bar?
Of all of them, it might seem at first glance that it is the Woolf reforms, aimed at reducing court-based advocacy altogether, that had most capacity to harm the Bar, but quantifying any actual decline in litigation levels is near impossible. Statistics outlining levels of court usage are notoriously poor, as Cap Gemini Ernst & Young discovered in the course of compiling their 2001 commercial court feasibility study.
