Have your say
There has already been a strong response to the surveys the ACL is conducting as part of its reviews of costs management and provisional assessment. The working parties want as many members as possible to take part by the end of next week, when the results will be collated and will form part of our report to the Civil Procedure Rule Committee.
The costs management survey can be found here, and the provisional assessment survey here.
What do you think of the CLSB?
The Legal Services Board (LSB) has launched a survey inviting views from anybody and any firm that has been in contact with one of the eight legal services regulators in England and Wales, including the Costs Lawyer Standards Board.
Chief executive Richard Moriarty said: “Understanding what people think about their dealings with the legal services regulators is important to understanding how we can all improve the way regulation operates in practice. We want to hear from anyone who has an experience (good, bad or indifferent) they wish to share with us about their dealings with a legal services regulator.
“We are looking to hear from individual consumers, legal professionals, people who work for organisations or bodies that work closely with the legal services regulators. The results will help us understand the issues from the point of view of those interacting with the regulators, and we will use the results to inform our review of the performance of the individual regulators.”
The survey can be accessed here and should not take more than 15 minutes to complete.
Reading matter
The paper Lord Justice Jackson described as his “skeleton argument” when giving last week’s Harbour Litigation Funding lecture, entitled ‘Confronting costs management’, is now available to download from the news section of the ACL website. The slides from HHJ Simon Brown QC’s presentation to the ACL Annual Conference have also been published there.
Discontinuance costs
A judge had been entitled to depart from the usual rule in that a claimant who had discontinued her claim was liable for the costs which a defendant had incurred, and order that the defendants should pay part of the claimant’s costs, the High Court has ruled.
According to a report of Barker & Anor v Barnett on Lawtel, the case had been brought to court as a consequence of the defendants’ failure to respond to pre-action correspondence and Mrs Justice Lang said they could not show that the judge’s decision was wrong.