Competition Appeal Tribunal judges need better training in emerging technologies, the president of the increasingly busy tribunal said yesterday. Mr Justice Marcus Smith told the Law Society’s 4th annual international antitrust summer conference: ‘We are going to have to train our judges better. Judges in the competition sphere not only have to be skilled lawyers, they are not only going to have to be pretty good economists, they are going to have to be people who are not scared of technology.
‘Of course, we are going to have experts who will tell us how the system works but that obligation to explain should not be from a standing start. It is very important that our judges understand the technology, not be frightened by it. Firstly, to ensure that the experts aren’t reinventing the wheel every time and secondly to ensure the court isn’t being sold a pup that is only exposed when the judgment is being written rather than on day one of the trial.’
The cross-disciplinary CAT, which was created by the 2002 Enterprise Act, already has ’a very aggressive, good in-house training programme’, he said.
Earlier, the conference was presented with data showing a significant shift in caseload to the CAT - particularly large and complex collective actions. 'There is a clear trend for competition claims to go to the CAT rather than the Commercial Court,' Sarina Williams, partner at magic circle Linklaters, said. Josh Holmes KC of Monckton Chambers told the conference that so far the CAT has ‘been dealing remarkably well’ with the increasse in cases, partly by becoming ’a hotbed of procedural innovation’. For practitioners, aggressive case management conferences have become ‘white knuckle rides’, he said.
In his keynote speech, Mr Justice Marcus Smith said the test of the collective actions regime would be its ability to recover 'genuine compensation'.
‘It does seem to me that unless there is proper compensation, unless the [claimants] are receiving the lion’s share of the damages that result out of either settlement or the successful trial, then access to justice is no more than a fig leaf covering a process where monies are essentially winging their way from a defendant into funder’s and claimant’s lawyers’ pockets,' he said.
‘That is the test for the next five years: whether we can establish a regime that is not merely an adjunct to public enforcement but which is achieving genuine compensation for the clients and that I think is true access to justice.’
This article is now closed for comment.
1 Reader's comment