Case Management — SQE1 FLK1 Dispute Resolution

A woman sues a builder for £12,000 over defective work to a garden wall. At the first case management conference her solicitor asks for three expert witnesses. For disclosure of every email the builder has sent or received over the past four years. And for a three-day trial. The builder is a sole trader.

The judge refuses all of it and gives directions for a single joint expert and a one-day trial. Why? One word. Proportionality. That word, and the rule behind it, decide more of this topic than anything else.

This is Case Management. Keep that garden wall in mind. We come back to it.

Here is the route. The overriding objective first, because everything after it is an application of it. Then active case management, and what the court can actually do. Then the four tracks and how a claim reaches one. Then directions and case management conferences. Then costs budgets. And finally non-compliance, sanctions, and the three questions the court asks before it lets you off.

Start at the top. The overriding objective, in CPR 1.1, is to enable the court to deal with cases justly and at proportionate cost. Read both halves. Justly, and at proportionate cost. A £10,000 dispute should not cost £50,000 to resolve. The procedure should fit the case, not the other way around.

Dealing justly and at proportionate cost includes seven things, so far as is practicable. The parties on an equal footing and able to give their best evidence. Saving expense. Dealing with the case proportionately. Dealing with it expeditiously and fairly. Allotting it an appropriate share of the court's resources.

Then two more, both worth a mark. Promoting or using alternative dispute resolution, added on 1 October 2024, so it is now part of the objective itself. And enforcing compliance with rules, practice directions and orders. Compliance sits in the same list as saving expense. The rules are not a courtesy.

Proportionality is the cornerstone. The court weighs the financial value of the claim, its importance to the parties, the complexity of the issues, and each party's financial position. Back to the garden wall. £12,000, a sole trader, three experts and four years of emails. You can hear the answer before the judge gives it.

Then two duties, and candidates mix them up. CPR 1.3 is a duty on the parties: they must help the court further the overriding objective. In practice, cooperating over sensible procedural requests and complying with directions. CPR 1.2 is the court's own duty, to give effect to the objective whenever it exercises a power or interprets a rule.

The parties' duty has teeth. Your opponent has been in hospital and asks for a further 14 days, and the trial window does not open until May. Your client, angry at being sued, tells you to refuse. Agree it. A refusal obstructs the objective rather than furthering it, and will draw a costs order once the other side is driven to apply.

Now what the court does with that. Under CPR 1.4 it must further the overriding objective by actively managing cases. Encouraging the parties to cooperate. Identifying the issues early. Deciding promptly which need full investigation and trial. Deciding the order in which they are resolved. Ordering or encouraging alternative dispute resolution. And helping the parties settle.

And the powers behind that. Strike out a claim or defence with no real prospect. Hear a preliminary issue separately. Stay proceedings. Limit the time for cross-examination, or the number of witnesses, or the number of experts.

Take the preliminary issue power. A patient sues a clinic for £150,000 and the defence says the claim is statute-barred, an issue turning on a handful of documents and one date. Quantum would need six experts and a two-week trial. Try limitation first. Win it, and none of that happens.

The alternative dispute resolution power changed recently. Know the date. In Churchill v Merthyr Tydfil, in 2023, the Court of Appeal held that a court may lawfully order the parties into non-court dispute resolution, or stay proceedings for it. Two conditions. The order must not impair the right to proceed to a judicial hearing, and it must be proportionate. On 1 October 2024 the rules caught up.

So try one. A claimant tells the judge the court has no power to make it mediate against its will. Right or wrong? Wrong. The court can order the parties to engage in alternative dispute resolution, and a short mediation of a discrete point is exactly the case for it.

Track allocation next, and this is where the marks are. Small claims is the normal track up to £10,000, with a hearing the court does not normally allow more than one day for. Costs recovery is limited: the winner generally recovers no legal costs, only fixed costs and court fees.

Fast track, £10,000 to £25,000, a one-day trial, fixed costs. Its defining feature: on allocation the court fixes the trial date, or a period not exceeding three weeks within which the trial is to take place. Everyone works backwards from a date known from the outset.

Intermediate track, £25,000 to £100,000. Trial no longer than three days, oral expert evidence limited to two experts per party, one claimant against one or two defendants. Then multi-track, over £100,000, five days or more, directions tailored to the case, and costs budgeting.

Value is where allocation starts, not where it ends. The court also weighs complexity, the number of parties, the importance of the case, the amount of oral evidence, and the value of any counterclaim. A £9,500 claim with six witnesses and a two-day estimate is inside the small claims limit and nowhere near the small claims track.

And the figure the court uses is not always the figure on the claim form. In assessing financial value it disregards any amount not in dispute, any claim for interest, costs, and contributory negligence. A lender claims £150,000. The borrower admits and pays £130,000 and disputes a £20,000 charge. So £20,000 in dispute, no experts, half a day. Fast track.

One more layer, and it is recent. Since 1 October 2023 a claim allocated to the fast track or the intermediate track must also be assigned to a complexity band. Four bands, band 1 the simplest to band 4 the most complex. The band, with the stage the case reaches, fixes recoverable costs under the extended fixed recoverable costs regime in CPR Part 45.

Directions now. The court's instructions for how the case gets to trial: what must be done, by whom, and by when. Disclosure. Then inspection. Then witness statements. Then expert reports, if permitted. Then a pre-trial review, and the trial window. That order is not decoration. Each step is built on the last one.

Which is why a missed date is never just one missed date. Disclosure slips by two months, so the statements written from those documents slip, so the experts slip, so the trial window goes. Your client says only one date will be missed. Your client is wrong.

Standard or tailored? Standard directions are published models, and the starting point on the fast and intermediate tracks. Multi-track claims are managed individually under CPR 29. But standard is not a straitjacket. A witness working offshore for six weeks either side of exchange justifies moving that one date, leaving the timetable intact.

Can you vary directions by agreement? Some, yes. But three dates are protected and move only by order of the court. The date fixed for a case management conference or pre-trial review. The date for returning pre-trial checklists. And the trial date or window. A consent order moving a trial window is worthless.

There is also a buffer. Where a rule or order sets a time and specifies the consequence of failure, the parties may agree an extension in writing. Up to 28 days, and only if no hearing date is put at risk. Six weeks by consent is not on offer.

Case management conferences. A case management conference is about how the case will be run, not who wins it. The court confirms the track, fixes dates for disclosure, witness statements and expert evidence, fixes a trial date or window, and asks about settlement. The merits are for trial.

Preparation is the whole game. The parties must endeavour to agree directions, and submit agreed directions or their proposals at least seven days before the hearing. Bring your client's availability, and be ready to justify any expert you want and say what it will cost.

Costs budgeting, and note where it sits. It applies to Part 7 multi-track claims under CPR 3.12, with exceptions, notably where the claim form states £10 million or more, and proceedings subject to fixed or scale costs. The other three tracks run on fixed recoverable costs instead. Each party files its own budget in Precedent H, phase by phase. The court approves or reduces. Never increases.

Timing is examinable. Under CPR 3.13, where the stated value on the claim form is under £50,000, budgets go in with the directions questionnaires. Otherwise, not later than 21 days before the first case management conference. Budget discussion reports in Precedent R follow, seven days before the hearing.

Two consequences to hold. Miss the budget deadline and, unless the court orders otherwise, you are treated as having filed a budget of the court fees alone. That is CPR 3.14, and it bites when the deadline passes. And once a costs management order is made, the court will not depart from the approved phase figures on a standard basis assessment without good reason.

So an overspend is not cured by winning. Disclosure is approved at £40,000 and costs £62,000, the documents having turned out more numerous than assumed. Nothing unforeseen happened, and no revised budget was submitted. That £22,000 is gone. Revise the budget in time, or lose it.

Non-compliance. Under CPR 3.4 the court may strike out a statement of case where a party has failed to comply with a rule, practice direction or order. May. A last resort, not the automatic result of a missed date. Below it sits a menu: extend time even after it has expired, impose conditions, stay, order costs.

So which response? The order specified no consequence. The defendant was five days late because the file sat with a fee earner on leave. The statement is now served and the trial window is eight months away. Extend the date, and order the costs thrown away.

An unless order is a different animal. There the sanction takes effect automatically when the deadline passes, with no further order. Serve your list two days late and the claim is already struck out.

Which brings us to relief. A sanction imposed by a rule, practice direction or order has effect unless the party in default applies for and obtains relief. Under CPR 3.9 the court considers all the circumstances so as to deal justly with the application. That includes conducting litigation efficiently and at proportionate cost, and enforcing compliance.

That inquiry has a shape, and it comes from Denton v TH White, 2014. Three stages. One: identify and assess the seriousness and significance of the breach. Two: consider why it occurred. Three: evaluate all the circumstances. If a breach is neither serious nor significant, stages two and three need not detain the court.

And Denton deliberately dropped a word. The earlier decision in Mitchell v News Group Newspapers, 2013, had produced a vocabulary of trivial breaches, and was being misapplied. The question is not whether a breach was trivial. It is whether it was serious or significant, judged mainly by whether it imperils hearing dates or disrupts the litigation.

Put two breaches side by side. A witness statement filed an hour late, with the other side told the same afternoon. And a costs budget filed three weeks late, in silence, after two reminders. The first disrupts nothing. The second threatens the timetable and leaves the opponent unable to plan.

Then promptness, which is where most applications are won and lost. Apply the moment you realise. Moving at once shows the court the default is taken seriously. A month spent on the other side's delays trades away your best point.

And the distinction the whole regime turns on. An application to extend time made before the deadline expires is not an application for relief from sanctions. It is an ordinary case management decision under the overriding objective, and Denton does not govern it. Miss the date first, and everything gets harder.

Back to our garden wall. A single joint expert, a one-day trial, and a procedure that fits the case. That is not the court being unhelpful. That is the overriding objective doing its job.

A word on how SQE1 tests this. You are not asked to recall case names or rule numbers. You get a scenario, five answers, and one instruction: pick the best. This topic is unusually rule-led, so the rules are the thing to learn. The names are memory pegs, nothing more.

If you keep only three. Denton v TH White, for the three stages of relief from sanctions. Mitchell v News Group Newspapers, only so you know that the word trivial went with it. And Churchill v Merthyr Tydfil, because it is why the court can now order you into alternative dispute resolution rather than suggest it.

Four traps. One: value does not decide the track on its own, and the figure on the claim form is not the figure the court uses. Strip out what is admitted, the interest and the costs, then ask how much evidence and court time the case needs.

Two: a sanction written into a rule or an order does not wait for a judge. It takes effect when the deadline passes. Waiting for the court to confirm it, or for the other side to complain, throws away the promptness that would have helped most.

Three: keep the two applications apart. Before the deadline, you are asking the court to vary a timetable, and the overriding objective decides it. After it, you are asking to be let off a sanction, and Denton decides it. The same facts, a day apart, treated very differently.

Four: conduct has a price. Ignore a direction, then two chasing letters and a formal warning, and the costs of the application you force on the other side may be assessed on the indemnity basis. There, doubt is resolved in their favour and proportionality does not apply.

Quick check. An expert's report in a £90,000 negligence claim is due by 30 July under the directions. On 14 July the expert is admitted to hospital and will be unfit to finalise it for several weeks. No other expert can be instructed in time. On 16 July the claimant applies for a six-week extension.

The defendant opposes, arguing that the claimant must satisfy the stringent tests for relief from sanctions. How will the court approach it? Three candidate answers. One: by applying the three-stage Denton test in full, because every application to move a date fixed by directions engages the relief regime.

Two: by granting it only if the claimant shows the breach was trivial and that it has otherwise complied. Three: as an ordinary case management decision under the overriding objective. Pause here if you want a moment.

The answer is three. An application for an extension of time made before the deadline has expired is an ordinary application to vary the timetable, decided by reference to the overriding objective. It is not an application for relief from sanctions, and Denton does not govern it. An unforeseeable hospitalisation, a prompt application and a realistic revised date will get this extension.

Why the others fail. One reaches for Denton, which bites after a deadline has been breached and a sanction engaged, not on in-time applications. Two borrows the word trivial from the relief framework, and there is no breach here at all. The duty to cooperate should have produced agreement without a hearing.

Five things to take away. One: the overriding objective is to deal with cases justly and at proportionate cost, and since 1 October 2024 promoting or using alternative dispute resolution is part of it. Two: small claims to £10,000, fast track to £25,000, intermediate to £100,000, multi-track above, and financial value disregards what is admitted and any interest.

Three: standard directions below the multi-track, tailored above it, and the trial window moves only by order of the court. Four: costs budgeting is a multi-track discipline, miss the deadline and your budget is the court fees, and an approved phase figure binds absent good reason to depart.

Five: a sanction bites on its own, and relief runs through three stages, seriousness, reason, and all the circumstances. And our garden wall? One expert, one day, and a procedure that fits the case. Next time, Evidence.

Practise this topic with exam-style questions at sqe1prep.co.uk. This episode is for education and exam revision only, not legal advice, and we are not affiliated with or endorsed by the SRA or Kaplan.