There are two reasons for running a week’s worth of reports and comments into a single article. The least meritorious of them is that I will not keep up with it all if I do not do a composite post. More positively, that is because a lot has been happening and I can better convey the sense of that in a single article. The overall message is one of positive steps forward, not merely defensiveness.
The previous week ended with a session run jointly with Andrew Haslam of Allvision at a medium-sized firm with a strong regional base and a London office. It is exactly the sort of firm which I have written about as holding the key to the future, at least in my own narrow ambit – agile, versatile, staffed with lawyers trained at the big city firms, and hungry for quality litigation work. It is the sort of firm which, if it makes alliances with the right providers of litigation services and invests in the skills, could take on much bigger firms at a cost lower than theirs, partly because their costs and charging rates are lower and partly because of the way they run their litigation. I will spend any amount of time with firms like this, because they get it, and could change client perceptions about how litigation should be managed.
I covered the background — the framework of rules and cases, the implications of the Jackson Report, and where we stand with the proposed new practice direction and ESI Questionnaire. Andrew Haslam spoke about the technology which is available and what a firm needs to have in place as processes and connections to be able to run with anything which comes along. In the pub afterwards, one of the solicitors told me frankly that he had come to the session expecting to be unconvinced but, having heard us on the subject of the ESI Questionnaire, intended to send it to his opponents in a particular case first thing on Monday morning. A result, I think. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Chris Dale 
