ABSTRACT
The Civil Procedure Rules 1998 (CPR) swept away a great deal of old law on the obligation of disclosure. The Woolf Reports which led to the CPR acknowledged that disclosure of documents was important in litigation, but noted that the disclosure process was often extremely onerous and resulted in the disclosure of lots of documents which were never used. It was often, in the terms beloved of the new Rules, ‘disproportionate’: the time, money and effort expended on disclosure bore little relationship to the effect of that disclosure on the just resolution of the dispute.
