Andrew Mitchell is a man best remembered by the public for having told a policeman he was a pleb. It’s best remembered by litigators, though, for Mitchell’s lawyers missing a deadline.
And that, says Richard Vary, head of litigation at Nokia, is the sign of something very worrying. Vary was our chair at The Lawyer’s Managing Risk and Mitigating Litigation conference last week, which saw 80 in-house heads of legal in a room with regulators, prosecuting authorities and leading private practice litigators. Vary, who sits part time as a judge, can see the litigation system from two sides, and his closing remarks were a call to arms. The Woolf reforms were supposed to unify procedure, but over the last 15 years each court has evolved whole sets of specialist rules. The White Book is now a bigger volume than all of Finland’s laws.
By exploiting a rococo set of rules where a win can be celebrated on procedural and not the substantive issues, the UK legal profession is colluding in its own decline. This isn’t naïvely reductionist: this is what your clients are saying. Already the UK is losing out on major patent litigation: high-tech and pharmaceutical companies are rushing to file their patent litigation in Germany because the system there is swift and streamlined. Singapore is catapulting up the arbitration rankings because unlike London, it’s seen as neutral by Asian and Russian clients.
Heads of litigation are already starting to worry about the long-term future of London. They talk about the court infrastructure, but the problem goes deeper than that: it’s lawyers’ unwillingness to recognise that they too may be part of the problems of complexity and cost.
The Global Litigation Top 50 2015, published today, shows the extent to which UK-headquartered firms have had to build disputes capability outside London. On that level, it’s a success story: English litigation is an export and there have never been so many UK firms in the big league. But that is masking a worrying shift away from London.
UK firms are losing out on corporate deals because of the pre-eminence of US financing. But the choice of legal forum is not linked to the dominance of the dollar. So if London loses its status as disputes capital of the world and its UK law firms lose their place at the global top table, they only have themselves to blame.
For the full Global Litigation Top 50 2015 report contact richard.edwards@centaurmedia.com
