I've been in huge commercial cases in there where people are practically hanging from the ceiling. In the summer it's boiling hot, and if people want to use the restrooms they go to a slum. Commercial, business, Chancery, call it what you like - it would be good to put all this work together. The debate around the UK's historical legal divisions has of course been raging for years. Briggs recalls the Heilbronn-Hodge report of 1993, a joint committee of the Bar Council and Law Society, of which he was a member.
Courts tend to have their own esprit de corps, and develop their own sets of rules.
Briggs adds that it would not be helpful to have yet another entity joining the current big three, all of which already have their own differing sets of rules, cultures and procedures. It is perhaps ironic then, as Pollack pointed out earlier, that Lord Woolf rejected the committee's proposal on the grounds that the Chancery Division's specialist judges and their close working relationships with specialist barristers would be diluted if they were plunged into the QBD melee. This seems to give weight to the idea that a new court would indeed become a whole new creature that would evolve its own customs and culture, thus further obscuring the already confusing interface between the public and whatever justice its members may be seeking. Taking into account the years of historical, constitutional and practical argument surrounding the way different cases should be listed, Harry Anderson, head of litigation at Herbert Smith, doubts that the Lord Chancellor's research can be carried out by mid-January as announced, and that the consultants charged with it are the best men for the job. Anderson says it is at the contract-drafting stage, where parties choose their preferred jurisdiction for dispute resolution, that the UK courts need to prove themselves attractive to commercial parties.