The launch of The Business and Property Courts of England & Wales
Polly Hill, Associate in our Commercial Dispute Resolution department provides a brief overview of this launch.
From July 2017 certain specialist jurisdictions of the High Court of England & Wales are now known as “The Business and Property Courts of England & Wales” (“B&PCS”).
The specialist jurisdictions comprise of the Commercial Court, the Admiralty Court, the Technology and Construction Court (“TCC”) and the courts of the Chancery Division (including those dealing with financial services, intellectual property, competition, trust & probate and insolvency).
The B&PCS are now in the 5 main regional centres namely Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol and Cardiff and in due course, they may be in Newcastle and Liverpool.
The consensus of Lord Justice Briggs and the Judicial Executive Board is that no case should be too big to be tried outside London and there should be an integrated Business & Property Courts structure across England & Wales. Presently many such cases migrate to the Rolls Building in London for a number of inadequate reasons and once there, they are often tried by a circuit judge from the region where the case originated from. The aim of the B&PCS is to achieve a critical mass of specialist judges sitting in each of the Business & Property regional centres so that all classes of case can be managed and tried in those regions where waiting times are considerably less than they are at the Rolls Building.
This blog was written by: Polly Hill
