Where next for multi-party litigation? Stephen Lister reports
Multi-party litigation was highlighted in Lord Woolf’s 1996 Access to Justice: Final Report as one of the weaknesses of the legal system. He noted a “lack of equality between the powerful, wealthy litigant and the under resourced litigant”. The Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) have now been in place for just over a decade—have they changed the status quo?
It would seem that there remains room for improvement—at least, according to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), the European Commission, and most recently the Civil Justice Council, which have all published papers containing proposals for reform.
The prospect of multi-party litigation is accompanied by the spectre of US-style class actions, which to many is anathema (hence the multiplicity of synonyms for “class actions” used in discussion of the topic: “collective claims”, and “consumer collective redress” being two). The reform proposals consider issues attendant on implementation of multi-party litigation, and propose solutions to these; key policy aims and considerations are set out below.
Office of Fair Trading
The OFT report, Private Actions in Competition Law: Effective Redress for Consumers and
