The High Court has imposed indemnity costs in two recent cases (DSN v Blackpool Football Club Ltd [2020] EWHC 670 (QB) and BXB v Watch Tower and Bible Tract Society of Pennsylvannia & Ors [2020] EWHC 656 (Admin)) as a result of a party’s unreasonable failure to engage in ADR. Read more

Hong Kong has published its long-awaited Code of Practice for third party funders and announced that amendments to the Arbitration Ordinance, which permit funding of Hong Kong arbitrations, will come fully into force on 1 February 2019.   However, proposed amendments to the Mediation Ordinance (Cap. 620) regarding non-Hong Kong mediations, costs and disclosure of mediation communications … Read more

Jan O’Neill Professional Support Lawyer, London   The Civil Justice Council’s ADR working group has released its final report on ADR and Civil Justice, following consultation on its interim report released last year. The broad mandate of the review was “to maintain the search for the right relationship between civil justice and ADR” and to … Read more

A costs judge has held that information about a party's costs provided for the purposes of a mediation could be used as evidence when considering the cost consequences of a subsequent settlement: Savings Advice Limited v EDF Energy Customers Ltd [2017] EWHC B1 (Costs)  Documents produced for the purposes of mediation are generally covered by … Read more

The Association of Costs Lawyers (ACL) has launched an ADR service dedicated to the resolution of costs disputes.  The service, which will initially be limited to mediation, will be provided by a panel of eight mediators, including former Senior Costs Judge Peter Hurst and three costs lawyers.   ACL plans to extend the service to include early neutral evaluation, … Read more

A recent High Court decision has provided a further example of a successful defendant being deprived of a portion of the costs it otherwise would have been awarded because it was found to have unreasonably refused to engage in ADR (applying the guiding principles laid out by the Court of Appeal in Halsey v Milton Keynes General NHS Trust … Read more

The Court of Appeal has delivered a judgment strongly reiterating its support for the role of ADR in civil litigation and extending the existing principles governing the question of when a litigant's failure to engage in ADR will justify a court imposing costs sanctions upon it (as established in Halsey v Milton Keynes General NHS Trust [2004] … Read more

The UK High Court recently refused to allow a claim to proceed in relation to mis-selling of an insurance product on the basis that the claimants had already been offered full redress under a formal ADR scheme established in relation to such complaints.   The decision is a further example of the UK courts’ support for ADR and illustrates that … Read more