Legal Commentary by James Perry

In October this year businesses who deal with consumers are bracing themselves for the additional noise their printers and post-rooms will be making moving forward as they start to print huge volumes of additional documents and spend lots more on their postage costs when chasing their debts. ISO environmental certifications will be put at risk as their post staff spend half their lives shuffling additional reams of paper and their office staff half their lives dealing with all the additional queries they will be faced with trying to ensure they meet the new regulatory requirements of the Pre-action protocol for debt claims. The above might seem like a mild over exaggeration but the reality is that these changes will cost businesses more in time and resources. For that reason, I find this a very strange amendment to the court rules; not least because it takes a simplistic process which was working really well in almost all cases ("Simple i...

Lord Justice Jackson has now issued his final report in respect of fixed-fees, which in general is fairly (I'm trying to be positive!) good news for legal practitioners and their clients. The proposed reforms do not cut as deep as we all initially thought so for now most of us are probably breathing a quiet sigh of relief. Clients should as well, unless you are a serial defendant - in which case you might be a bit disappointed that the fixed-fee proposals didn't go further! However, not all areas of business and the profession were winners when the report was published last week. Unfortunately it doesn't look like particularly good news for businesses instructing Solicitors to collect their debts or indeed Solicitors who represent clients in "defended debt cases" who will now (if the proposals are introduced) face tricky conversations with their clients when trying to explain that it is likely that success will not yield the net recovery ...