Litigation/Dispute Resolution

The Master of the Rolls yesterday signalled his intention to revolutionise civil costs and has already set the Civil Justice Council working on a wide-ranging review.

A number of large UK commercial law firms will fall into the hands of US private equity investors next year, the founder of Doorway Capital, which owns national firm Simpson Millar, has predicted.

A master has labelled as “a form of procedural abuse” a bid to bring a data breach claim in the High Court where the “very modest” damages would be dwarfed by costs of £50,000.

The Civil Justice Council has set out a shopping list of potential changes to pre-action protocols (PAPs), including a summary costs procedure and new PAPs.

A company director had no standing to challenge an insolvency practitioner’s assignment of a claim against her parents to a litigation funder, the High Court has ruled.

Judges have the power to direct cross-examination of a lawyer against whom a wasted costs order is sought, but it should be “very much the exception”, the Court of Appeal said yesterday.

The Master of the Rolls has named legal futurist Professor Richard Susskind as chair of a new high-powered group tasked with drawing a road-map for the civil justice system through the 2020s.

The Supreme Court has blocked a £3bn representative action for misuse of private data by Google that did not seek to prove that consumers had actually suffered any damage.

The High Court has refused to make an order to prevent future claims on a law firm’s fees that claimants may argue came from stolen funds.

The Court of Appeal has refused to hear an appeal from the Upper Tribunal Tribunal in Glasgow which would have allowed the appellant to keep using his English solicitor.

A significant number of expert witnesses who have been appeared in court remotely over the past 18 months say barristers have been “less aggressive” in their cross-examination.

The civil justice system and some areas of the law in England and Wales are “in desperate need of modernisation”, a report by the Social Market Foundation has found.

A solicitor and chief executive of one of the legal profession’s regulators is leading the latest opt-out collective action, which is being brought against price comparison website ComparetheMarket.

Online bots powered by artificial intelligence will be one way simple disputes are resolved in the future, the Master of the Rolls predicted last week.

A law firm now part of consolidator Metamorph Law has been only partially successful in striking out a claim over how it advised a client on his clinical negligence case.