effectiveness of the woolf report reform

In the mid nineteen eighties the English Civil Justice System was deemed to be in an unsatisfactory state, so in 1986 the Civil Justice Review, headed by Maurice Hodgkinson was set up to investigate the flaws and make recommendations on how to improve it. The report issued in 1988 did not receive popular support from the legal profession due to vested interests; Hodgkinson was not a lawyer and the recommendations he made, if implemented, were most definitely to result in a reduction of money received by lawyers, barristers and judges. Consequently only a few changes were made by the Legal Services Act 1990. Thus in 1994 the Conservative government appointed Lord Woolf to head a review into the whole system, 1996 saw the publication of the "Access To Justice Report" AKA "The Woolf Report".

In his report Lord Woolf identified fundamental problems with the system and suggested ways in which they could be overcome, he declared eight principal aims and concluded that none of them were be...