ABSTRACT
In his Final Report, Lord Woolf said that costs were ‘central to the changes’ he wished to bring about and that virtually all his recommendations for reform of the civil procedure system were ‘designed at least in part to tackle the problems of costs’. He stated that his reforms were designed to reduce the amount of costs incurred by a party by controlling what was required of a party in the conduct of proceedings, to make the amount of costs more predictable and more proportionate to the nature of the dispute. He also recommended that costs be used more effectively as a method to control unreasonable behaviour and that litigants should be provided with more information about costs so that they could exercise greater control over their lawyer’s expenditure of costs on their behalf.1
