One year on, David Greene assesses the impact of Jackson
A year on and for good or bad many practitioners remain to be convinced that the Jackson reforms will achieve fairer and less costly litigation (see NLJ /LSLA’s Litigation Trends Survey update). Sir Rupert may, however, feel that the heat of practitioners’ ire has moved away from his immediate reforms to the burning issues raised by the Court of Appeal in the Mitchell decision (Mitchell v News Group [2013] EWCA Civ 1537, [2014] 1 WLR 795).
Broad assumptions
Such was the nature of change in April 2013 and the manner in which it took effect under the transitional provisions, a year down the road we still do not have a measure of the effect of the reforms other than the broad assumptions that accompanied them. It may indeed be many years before we can measure the true effect of these on access to justice for both claimants and defendants with the competing concepts of reducing the cost of the process for all but cutting back on costs recoverability
