Guidance

Practice Direction update 104: various Civil Procedure Rules amendments

Practice Direction update to the Civil Procedure Rules including changes related to open justice, Electronic Costs Bill, budget discussion report and court closures.

• From: Civil Procedure Rule Committee and Ministry of Justice
• Published: 17 February 2019

Applies to England and Wales

Documents

Practice Direction update 104

PDF, 1 MB, 34 pages

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Details

104th Practice Direction update

This comes into effect in part immediately with further updates therein effective variously from 1 April 2019.

It includes the following changes.

Summary	Details
Open justice	This makes further changes by moving provisions concerning the presentation and bundling of documents from Practice Direction 39A (which will be removed in its entirety) to Practice Direction 32 – Evidence. Further, Practice Direction 39B – Court Sittings – will be renumbered “Practice Direction 2F”, to be within Part 2 of the CPR and the other Practice Directions which supplement that Part. Finally, new Practice Direction 3G, which provides guidance on requests by the court for the appointment of an advocate to the court, which replicates, with minor amendments, provisions previously included in a memorandum between the Lord Chief Justice and the Attorney General. Overall, these changes followed the related consultation in the summer of 2018, for which the Government response is yet to be published.
Electronic Costs Bill	A new Practice Direction to enable a two-year voluntary pilot for costs for summary assessment and new forms N260A and N260B.
Budget discussion report	This makes adjustments to Precedent R Budget Discussion Report (Practice Direction 3E on Costs Management).
Court closures	These changes are to reflect the recent closures of the Chichester District Registry and County Court hearing centre on 28 December 2018, and the Chippenham and Trowbridge County Court hearing centre on 26 October 2018.
Shorter and Flexible Trials pilot	This is to formally remove the pilot scheme, which ended on 30 September 2018 and which has been superseded by Practice Direction 57AB.
Welsh language	Correcting a minor drafting issue to standardise the terminology, namely, replace ‘Allocations Questionnaire’ with the term ‘Directions Questionnaire’.

Forms

The following forms have been either created or modified as part of this update:

• forms N260A and N260B (included as annexes within the update)
• Precedent R has been modified (included as an annex within the update)

Published 17 February 2019