Civil Procedure Rules 1998

The Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) are the rules of civil procedure used by the Court of Appeal, High Court of Justice, and County Courts in civil cases in England and Wales. They apply to all cases commenced after 26 April 1999, and largely replace the Rules of the Supreme Court and the County Court Rules.

The CPR were designed to improve access to justice by making legal proceedings cheaper, quicker, and easier to understand for non-lawyers. As a consequence of this, many archaic legal terms were replaced with "plain English" equivalents, such as "claimant" for "plaintiff" and "witness summons" for "subpoena".

Unlike the previous rules of civil procedure, the CPR commence with a statement of their “Overriding Objective”, both to aid in the application of specific provisions and to guide behaviour where no specific rule applies.

In 1994, the Lord Chancellor instructed the Master of the Rolls, Lord Woolf, to report on options to consolidate the existing rules of civil procedure. On 26 July 1996, Lord Woolf published his Access to Justice Report 1996 in which he "...identified a number of principles the civil justice system should meet to ensure access to justice. The system should –

Lord Woolf listed two of the requirements of case management as "...fixing timetables for the parties to take particular steps in the case; and limiting disclosure and expert evidence".

The second thread of the report was to control the cost of litigation, both in time and money, by focusing on key issues rather than every possible issue and limiting the amount of work that has to be done on the case.

The report was accompanied by draft rules of practice designed to implement Lord Woolf's proposals. These rules: granted wide management powers to the court proposed that cases be allocated to one of three tracks depending on their nature, limiting or requiring specific actions; and introduced the concept of proportionality to the costs regime.

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