This summer marks the 10th anniversary of Lord Woolf’s Access to Justice report. It identified many failings in the civil justice system, including the fact that costs often exceed the value of the claim, it is too slow in bringing cases to a conclusion and it is too uncertain, difficult to forecast and often incomprehensible to litigants themselves.
Although many of his recommendations were incorporated into the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR), many problems continue. Indeed, personal injury litigation remains a distinctly adversarial forum, where claims can take years to conclude and costs regularly exceed the value of the claim, often by a large margin.
