Will Mitchell herald a whole new culture of conducting civil litigation, asks Nicholas Heaton
Commentators on the Court of Appeal’s decision in Mitchell v News Group Newspapers [2013] EWCA Civ 1537, [2013] All ER (D) 314 (Nov) have so far focused on the justice or otherwise of the decision, or on its importance in terms of the rules on costs budgeting. In time, however, the Mitchell decision may be seen as the catalyst for something far more ground-breaking: a whole new culture of conducting civil litigation. The case may allow the Jackson reforms to achieve something that the Woolf reforms did not manage—a more general understanding that the rules are there to be obeyed.
Power of the courts
One of the key innovations in the Woolf reforms was that responsibility and control of litigation would shift from the litigants and their legal advisers to the courts. A range of case management powers was duly included in the new Civil Procedure Rules, the idea being that judges would fix and enforce strict timetables for procedural steps leading to trial and for the trial itself. However in practice
