“Hopefully this will be well thought through, planned and managed. Assuming the legal arguments can be resolved, I think it's an obvious evolution of the legal system and a welcome overhaul bringing it into the 21st century.
I'm not so sure of references and pundit claims comparing it to paypal or ebay disputes are going to carry much favour, personally that will do more harm than good.
What does anyone else think?”
Interesting thoughts. Quite agree with the Ebay comparison. There's been some interesting exchanges with Graham Ross, one of the advisory panel.
My thoughts have been done to death in my original blog and also on that forum, but in essence, whilst I think that this is a good idea, £25,000 is just too high a threshold to claim without SOME legal advice.
People need to be able to recover some limited level of legal costs otherwise many people will try and run this level of cases themselves - just as many do now on the small claims track, they won't spend money they can't get back if they win.
The courts are already full of people being patiently walked through the law by judges (not their fault - unless they can recover their legal costs they often can't afford to employ a lawyer) and that's just up to £10,000.
If all cases up to £25,000 are included in this process, with no ability to recover costs if successful, that will be a huge number of extra people who will need to be helped through the process by the mediators, facilitators and judges.
As you say, if this is done properly, it could be good. But my hopes are not high...
