Top judge urges reform in civil lawsuit system in England and Wales

Greater use of technology should be central to “deep-seated reform” to help resolve more civil lawsuits in England and Wales without recourse to a court system of which a key part is “not fit for purpose”, one of the most senior judges has proposed.

Sir Geoffrey Vos, who as the newly appointed Master of the Rolls is responsible for the civil justice court system, said claims brought by consumers and businesses should be able to start and sometimes finish online, rather than the current paper-based process, to help accelerate dispute resolution.

Future generations will not accept a “slow, paper-based and courthouse centric justice system”, Vos told the Financial Times, adding that an integrated system would be of “tremendous economic value to the UK”.

“I think if you can’t vindicate legal rights quickly and effectively and at reasonable cost then I think business is very severely damaged. I’m very keen that we see a digitised justice system,” he said. “Unfortunately we still have a paper-based county court which simply is not fit for purpose in 2021.”

Vos’s remit includes London’s High Court which handles the most complex litigation as well as the County Courts, which handle more than 90 per cent of all civil court cases and is still largely reliant on paper documents. Of the 2m county court cases filed each year, about 1.6m are money-related small claims, usually related to disputes worth under £10,000. 

Vos said he envisaged an integrated online civil justice system that would allow almost all disputes, such as money-related claims, family law cases or tribunal matters, to be filed online using a common data set.

These cases would pass through an online “funnel” where there would be repeated attempts at mediation to help settle disputes before they reached court. Complex lawsuits and high-profile litigation that could not be resolved in this way would go forward to a civil trial.

A centralised website would direct parties to the best way of resolving their dispute: either via a court hearing, through mediation or through an industry ombudsman, he said.

“A holistic approach is really important because consumers and small businesses don’t always know what their dispute really is or where it is best to go to resolve it,” Vos said. “In the modern online world we should be able to deal with that very easily.”

Vos said there also needed to be a greater emphasis on finding the right moment when both parties were amenable to a dispute being settled. “People think by paying a fee they’re getting the right to a judge to resolve the dispute — whereas what they should be thinking is paying a fee to receive a resolution as quickly and economically as possible,” he added.

Vos cautioned that an integrated online system would not solve every civil dispute: “It won’t change humanity — people will still get into squabbles — but it will enable there to be targeted interventions at a much earlier stage.”

The Ministry of Justice is in the middle of a seven-year £1.2bn reform programme to modernise the entire court system in England and Wales, introducing technology such as video links, and by 2023 it expects that 2.4m cases a year, or well more than half the 4.1m cases in 2016 when the target was set, will be dealt with outside courtrooms.

Vos said his vision of a reformed civil justice system “in part springs from the government reform programme” but added that this work “would not complete” it and so further investment would be needed.

So far only a handful of countries use technology to resolve civil disputes — notably Canada’s Civil Resolution Tribunal in British Columbia, which allows the public to resolve personal injury motor claims without being represented by lawyers.

Outside the court system, about 60m disagreements between eBay traders are resolved by artificial intelligence globally each year and the UK’s Financial Ombudsman Service resolves almost 300,000 consumer complaints annually. 

Vos said London’s High Court, which sees about two-thirds of lawsuits brought by non-UK litigants, would always remain a key centre for hearing complex litigation but said that even the resolution of larger disputes could be helped by greater use of technology.

“We must not be complacent, we must keep developing, we must keep improving the system,” he said.