Xerox XLS is organising a webinar called Preparing for the Jackson Reforms to take place on Monday 15 October at 4 PM BST. The participants are Senior Master Steven Whitaker, U.K. Royal Courts of Justice, Robert D. Brownstone, Esq., Technology & E-Discovery Counsel and Co-Chair, EIM Practice Group, Fenwick & West LLP and Gabriela P. Baron, Esq., Xerox Litigation Services. I am the moderator.
April 2013 brings a number of significant reforms to the management of litigation in England and Wales. Many of those concern case management, giving effect to Lord Justice Jackson’s comments in his reports about the need for judges to make full use of their powers of active management to ensure that cases proceed in line with the overriding objective.
One of Lord Justice Jackson’s themes was that clients require (and deserve) transparency and predictability of timescales and costs. A big step was taken in this direction with the eDisclosure Practice Direction 31B of 2010 and the Electronic Documents Questionnaire which came with it. That was in hand before Lord Justice Jackson’s report on litigation costs, but was consistent with the same theme of active management and predictability.
The 2013 reforms, amongst other things, extend the obligation to exchange information to a wider range of cases, give the court a clearer power to order disclosure appropriate to the case by replacing the present default of standard disclosure with a “menu option” of orders which might be made, and provide for costs management in the form of budgets to be agreed and / or ordered by the court.
Senior Master Whitaker led the working party which devised the practice direction and is a practical authority on its implementation – “practical” in the sense that he is an active case managing judge. Although the rules obviously apply only in England and Wales, the principles which they set out apply more widely. Robert Brownstone and Gabriela Baron will help us draw wider messages from the proposed new rules which are of importance to judges, lawyers and clients in any jurisdiction which requires discovery of documents.
eDisclosure Information Project 