Lord Justice Jackson has stressed that lawyers need to embrace his proposed reforms of case management if the necessary ‘culture change’ he envisages is to be realised.

The architect of the government’s reform of civil litigation hopes that by securing the co-operation of the Law Society and Bar Council, the profession will not be ‘taken by surprise’ by the far-reaching measures.

This co-operation will be crucial, he said, if there are to be ‘fewer casualties’ of the process than there were in Singapore - a jurisdiction where ‘shock tactics’ were effective in reforming an inefficient court system.

Jackson was delivering the latest in a series of lectures on implementing his reform programme, entitled ‘Achieving a culture change in case management’. Following recent meetings with the bar chair and Society president, Jackson said he understood both to be ‘generally supportive’ of his package of case management reforms.

‘Singapore practitioners and judges have made the point to me that there was insufficient forewarning of the profession and insufficient dialogue with the profession about what lay in store. Hopefully we can avoid that mistake in England and Wales,’ he said.

Jackson outlined various Civil Procedure Rule amendments that will be held ‘in escrow’ until the ‘big bang’ - implementation of Part 2 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, which is presently in the Lords. ‘A change in the culture of case management is more likely to be achieved if all the main reforms are introduced simultaneously, rather than sequentially over a period of time.’

These changes include more rigorous enforcement of case directions given by the court; and court monitoring of compliance directions, pre-empting the need for sanctions. Jackson noted in particular that claimant personal injury solicitors had complained that the courts ‘let liability insurers off the hook for failing to comply with the pre-action protocol and case management directions’.

He said that these changes should coincide with more effective judicial training and measures to assign cases to designated judges with relevant expertise.

Further case management recommendations not being taken forward now could be introduced in future legislation, he suggested.

These include a proposal that pre-action applications should be permitted where one party refuses to comply with a pre-action protocol, and allowing district judges occasionally to sit in the Court of Appeal as assessors when case management issues arise.

Read the speech.