Friday 17 May 2013 at 12:00
Empirical Legal Studies Discussion Group
Assessing the 'Greater Wrong of the Law' - The Statistical Landscape of the English Law of Costs in the era of the Jackson Reforms
Speaker: Winky So, Exeter College
Venue: Oxford Law Faculty Senior Common Room
The problem of high litigation costs is nothing new in English law. Complaining about how expensive lawyers are had been an English national pastime for centuries. In 1846, after paying more in costs than what he could recover from publishers who pirated A Christmas Carol, Dickens declared that 'it is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong of the law'.[1] This is true to some extent also in the present day. Victories in court battles can be pyrrhic. Parties who are brave enough to seek to vindicate their rights in the courts of law could find themselves with bills of costs with amounts that exceed their awards of damages.
One of the aims of the recent Jackson reforms is promote access to justice at a proportionate cost, which in itself is an overriding objective under the Civil Procedure Rules. The reports that had led to the reforms revealed a lot of statistical data in relation to civil litigation costs. By examination of this data, this paper would evaluate the current situation in England using statistical techniques and attempt to provide some answers to questions in relation to access to courts in England, including: how high, and how disproportionate are litigation costs currently in England? Is there a marked difference between cases belonging to different subject areas, or different courts? How had things fared since the introduction of the regimes of Conditional Fee Agreements and After-the-Event Litigation Insurance after the Access to Justice Act 1999? Do fees charged by solicitors and barristers in litigation really mainly depend on the complexity of the case? Do personal injury claimants in England legally represented under conditional fee agreements really fare better than their counterparts in the US under contingency fee agreements?
For more information please see the event website or contact: Paul Troop
View the page for this research project
Interested in this subject? View our Civil Procedure page.
Organised by the Empirical Legal Studies Discussion Group
