Abstract

Lord Briggs published the findings of his Civil Court Structure Review in 2015 and 2016. One of the core recommendations of this seminal report was the creation of the Online Solutions Court, an online dispute resolution system for low value civil claims based heavily on the Civil Resolution Tribunal in British Columbia. Lord Briggs’s proposed structure was endorsed by the senior judiciary in 2017 and adopted as part of Her Majesty’s Court and Tribunal Service’s court reform programme. However, despite proposing, in essence, to transplant the Civil Resolution Tribunal model into the English civil justice system, the reports did not include a detailed analysis of how this could be carried out, taking account of any mitigations and divergences of approach which would need to be adopted. There remains no singular piece of research which has done so.
This thesis advances the initial foundation proposal put forward by Lord Briggs for the Online Solutions Court by conducting a comparative analysis of how the composite stages of the Civil Resolution Tribunal were embedded into the British Columbian civil justice system and how it is proposed that the corresponding stages of the Online Solutions Court will be embedded in England and Wales, taking into account the historic relationship between government funding and the civil justice systems in the comparator jurisdictions. The proposals put forward at the end of this study, if adopted, create a framework which will enhance the design, development and implementation of the Online Solutions Court in England and Wales. Adoption of the concluding recommendations will prevent the Online Solutions Court from simply becoming a digitised version of the current County Court procedure: something which has been repeatedly recognised as being too costly, too complex and too lengthy to provide adequate access to justice for unrepresented litigants in low value claims.