The CFA and civil procedure

Abstract

Approximately 80 CFA judgments between 1997 and 2010 touched upon civil procedure. About a quarter of those decisions concerned the CFA’s own procedures (i.e. when leave to appeal will be granted), and almost as many dealt with costs. Far fewer addressed weightier matters such as pleadings or evidence. An examination of some of the CFA’s decisions is a worthwhile exercise given the significance to practitioners and their clients of what the court’s members said from 1997 to 2010. This paper will do so in the sequence that procedural issues are usually encountered by parties (i.e. pleadings followed by discovery and so on). It is not a review of every case considered by the CFA – or even of every case on a specific issue – but a ‘snapshot’ that, it is hoped, will illustrate how the CFA approached some potentially tricky procedural issues during this formative period of its history.