‘DDJ Goodliffe‘ of the Brexeter County Court fires a warning shot against recalcitrant lawyers & experts
The Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) are a comparable development to the laws of Hammurabi and Justinian, Magna Carta and the Napoleonic Code. All English lawyers who practise litigation in the 21st century should contribute to the advancement of the reforms. Resistance to this progress must be crushed.
The most important aspect of the rules is the emphasis on making wasted costs orders against recalcitrant lawyers. Many solicitors who conduct litigation in this country are either over-aggressive, over-greedy, incompetent or lazy. Lawyers have grown fat over the last 50 years from legal aid and the generosity of the Court Taxing Office. If lawyers witness the humiliation and ruin of those who incur the displeasure of the judiciary, they may start to shape up. Experience has proved that appeals to the higher instincts of people like this merely fall on deaf ears.
There is, however, an increasing realisation that wasted costs orders may in certain circumstances be an insufficiently Draconian remedy. Liability for wasted costs may be covered by the
