Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
NEW PROCEDURES FOR THE ENGLISH COURTS
The Civil Procedure Rules
With effect from 26 April 1999 a new procedural code governs the conduct of cases before all courts in England and Wales. The Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) will apply to cases conducted before the Commercial Court in London and other specialist courts, each of which will operate additionally on the basis of new Practice Directions. There will however be no change to the jurisdiction of any of the courts, all of which will continue to hear cases of the same type as previously. The CPR and the relevant Practice Directions relate only to procedure.
While the CPR will apply to all court proceedings commenced in relation to arbitration, the CPR will not affect the conduct of arbitration in London. This will continue to be subject to the provisions of the Arbitration Act 1996 and the rules and procedures of individual arbitration regimes, inter alia the ICC, the LCIA, LMAA, GAFTA and Lloyd’s Open Form (LOF 95). It is however quite possible that arbitrators will consider that relevant aspects of the CPR should be adopted in the context of individual arbitration references.
This paper relates principally to the way in which the Commercial Court in London will operate. While separate Practice Directions have been published in respect of the Admiralty Court and the Chancery Courts, the practice and procedure of those courts will not, save in respect of matters specific to their own jurisdiction, be significantly different from that to be applied in the Commercial Court.
Background
At the conclusion of his report, Access to Justice 1995, Lord Woolf wrote:
The underlying themes of the report, which I firmly endorse, are that: the philosophy of litigation should be primarily to encourage early settlement of disputes; litigants and their lawyers need to have imposed upon them an obligation to prosecute and defend their proceedings with efficiency and despatch; and procedures should be simple and easily comprehensible to the layman and lawyer alike.
The Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg, expressed similar views in his introduction to the CPR:
The message for all those in the civil justice system, judges, practitioners and court staff alike, is that the changes being introduced in April are as much changes of culture as they are changes in the Rules themselves. We have to be ready to be proactive.
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