Kerry Underwood recommends some summer reading & top tips for the new Lord Chancellor
Our new Lord Chancellor, David Lidington, faces an unenviable task in dealing with a civil justice system that is in serious difficulty. Low judicial morale and the related inability to recruit judges, stratospheric court fees and seemingly endless and disjointed reviews and reports, Brexit, and a legal profession close to despair are just some of the matters that will require his urgent attention. Here are a few ideas as to how matters could be improved.
Improvement matters
First, only the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), and no other government department, should make proposals for reform of the justice system or the costs regime. Thus the Department of Health’s proposals regarding clinical negligence costs should be withdrawn and fed into Lord Justice Jackson’s recently published review of fixed costs. Anyone on the wrong end of costs orders thinks that they are too high. The Health Department is there to run the health service, not to determine the level of costs it should pay when it loses. On that basis every department could make
