An ongoing priority for the Scottish Civil Justice Council is to progress a comprehensive rewrite of the rules that govern how civil litigation can be progressed through the civil courts.  That multi-year programme of work is being overseen by our Rules Rewrite Committee.  The desired outcome is to progressively replace the wide range of existing rules of court with a simplified, consolidated and user friendly set of New Civil Procedure Rules.

The first major deliverable from that work was the New Civil Procedure Rules – First Report which we published in May 2017.  That report set out some of the overarching principles that are helping us to reshape the overall form and structure of court rules.

The second major deliverable is the New Civil Procedure Rules – Second Report which we are publishing today.  It sets out a Procedural Narrative as our vision for how a civil action could in future be progressed more efficiently from the initiation of a new case through to the eventual resolution of the matters in dispute. The aim is for that new model for ordinary procedure to support litigation across both the Court of Session and the sheriff courts.  Similar models for how we should progress the more specialist court procedures will be developed later in the programme.

Over the next year the Council will be using this procedural narrative to draft a set of new rules to reflect that new model for ordinary procedure.  We will then look to consult end users in order to refine and finalise those new civil procedure rules.

For any queries or feedback, please contact the Council at scjc@scotcourts.gov.uk .