ABSTRACT
The Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) 1998 and most of the practice directions were published on 29 January 1999. The introduction of the CPR requires a partnership between practitioners, judges and the Court Service. A large litigation support industry, generating a multi-million pound fee income, has grown up among professions such as accountants, architects and others, and new professions have developed, such as accident reconstruction and care experts. The rules on expert evidence on the fast track will therefore limit the parties generally to one expert per side in any single speciality with no oral evidence. The burden will lie on the party seeking permission to call an expert witness to justify doing so. If the expert evidence is given by report, the "unavailability date" problem disappears. This is important in the fast track with its presumption that the date of trial will be within 30 weeks of the date of the allocation directions.
