We can cut legal costs and delays, says top lawyer

Monday 09 June 2014

Jersey needs to have a sweeping review of laws and legal practices to get rid of ancient rules that are creating unnecessary delays and costs for Islanders, says the former head of the law society.

Advocate Tim Hanson says that Jersey needs to learn from the 1999 reforms that were carried out in the UK to modernise and improve legal processes. Although those reforms were not universally successful, he says that Jersey could learn a lot from the UK experience by tackling outdated practices.

He said: “Jersey’s current legal system has grown out of a very different legal world, where French was the main language and customary law was the norm. The values that were part of that legal system are not necessarily the same values that we aspire to in the 21^st century where we speak about access to justice in resolving disputes quickly and at as little cost as possible.

“It’s not just taking some of the more successful reforms that happened in the UK and grafting them on, there is also a need to assess those areas of quite archaic practices that are from a bygone age.”

He cited property transactions on a Friday afternoon, modernising conveyancing and steps to go through before a dispute reaches court as examples of improvements that could be made in the Island. And he added that the legal aid system should be changed to ensure that clients were advised by lawyers with expertise in the area of the particular legal issue in question, something which he says does not happen at the moment.

Advocate Hanson said: “We should try to change the culture of litigation in Jersey so that lawyers co-operate with the court in trying to resolve disputes as quickly and efficiently as possible rather than lawyers playing procedural games with each other. But we also need, if we are going to embrace those values, to get rid of other archaic practices.”