Lord Justice Jackson’s review of litigation costs covered very much more than the case management and eDisclosure components which are, inevitably, my primary focus.  As with any major reforms, there are winners and losers or those who see themselves as such.  The range of the reforms is immensely wide and one can accept some parts while rejecting others.

I have enough to bite off in my own small sphere, and support, more or less without qualification, Lord Justice Jackson’s ambitions to control the scope, the method and the cost of disclosure. Like everybody else, I deplore the manner in which these reforms have been rolled out, something which cannot be attributed to Jackson himself. We will all have detailed observations on the minutiae of the budget proposals, but the detail has been rather lost in the late, incoherent and damaging launch.

Kerry Underwood ranges across the whole field covered by Jackson and has produced a comprehensive survey headed Jackson implementation overview – with all the links. You can get the flavour of it from his opening paragraphs which include the following:

The programme of implementation and announcements is shambolic.

Few observers now doubt that this will be the most chaotic period in legal costs and funding since the concept of legal costs was codified in the Statute of Westminster 1275.

The senior judiciary, according to the ever-reliable Professor Dominic Regan “despair of the shambles surrounding Jackson implementation”.

You do not have to agree with all Kerry Underwood’s conclusions to be clear that you will not find a more comprehensive critique anywhere.