Big week for the ACL
Approximately 150 students on the new ACL course sat their end-of-year exams on Monday. Our best wishes to this group of hard-working Costs Lawyers of the future.
Gove backs ODR
Plans to introduce online dispute resolution into the court system received a huge boost this week when the new Lord Chancellor backed the Civil Justice Council’s recent proposals to introduce it by 2017.
In a wide-ranging speech on his approach to the justice system, Michael Gove said businesses and individuals alike were astonished that “they cannot easily file their case online. And it astounds them that they cannot be asked questions online and in plain English, rather than on paper and in opaque and circumlocutory jargon”.
In a speech in London, he said: “The current system adds to stress at times of need, and restricts access to high quality resolution of disputes by simply being too complex, too bureaucratic and too slow. Across our court and tribunal system, we need to challenge whether formal hearings are needed at all in many cases, speed up decision making, give all parties the ability to submit and consider information online, and consider simple issues far more proportionately.
“Thanks to pioneering work the judiciary have commissioned from reformers like Professor Richard Susskind, there is now a huge opportunity to take many of these disputes online. Questions which have previously required expensive court time and have often as a result been marked by acrimony, bitterness and depleted family resources can now be resolved more quickly, efficiently and harmoniously.”
But he indicated that at the same time the court estate was likely to be reduced.
Portal case leapfrogged
An appeal on the contentious issue of which fixed costs apply in portal ‘drop-out’ cases when they settle before trial, which has led to several conflicting first instance decisions, has been leapfrogged to the Court of Appeal.
The central issue arises from the practice of some county courts to list ‘drop-out’ cases for a disposal hearing in the first directions order, arguably skipping a stage in the fixed costs tables in CPR 45.29, and the case subsequently settles before that disposal hearing.
The question then is which stage has been reached – and particularly whether the stages are sequential, meaning you have to go through one to reach the higher fee in the next stage – and whether a disposal hearing is a trial.
In Bird v Acorn Group, a public liability claim, the claimant argued for the third column – meaning £3,790 plus 27.5% of the damages – while the defendant contended that the first column still applied, meaning £2,450 plus 17.5% of the damages.
District Judge Campbell ruled in favour of the claimant, saying that once the matter was listed for disposal, “the case, in my view, moved into column 3”.
She said: “There is absolutely nothing in the rules that tells the court or the parties that they must move sequentially through the columns….
“Indeed, there are a large number of cases which settle just before the disposal hearing or on the morning of it and I can take judicial notice of that fact as a judge who regularly deals with disposal lists. It cannot be right that those cases attract the same amount of costs as a case that settles after issue but before any allocation by the court.”