Jonathan Pratt provides a statistical analysis of recent trends in City litigation
Every year, the Ministry of Justice publishes statistics on judicial and court activity. This year’s stats are analysed in this article which:
Reviews the figures for the past decade and considers the impact of the Woolf Reforms on litigation in the City of London.
Focuses on the statistics for 2008, which were published last month, to see whether the credit crunch has resulted in a rise in litigation.
Considers the figures for the now defunct Appellate Committee of the House of Lords in an attempt to to identify any trends that will be relevant to the newly created UK Supreme Court.
The impact of Woolf
Figure 1 below shows that the aftermath of the Woolf Reforms and the introduction of the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) saw a significant reduction in claims issued in the Royal Courts of Justice (from 30,251 in 1999 to 22,634 in 2002).
The decline was most striking in the Queen’s Bench Division, where the number of claims issued
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