Warning of fewer court registrars after retirements

THE NUMBER of judges may exceed the number of registrars next year following expected retirements in the Courts Service, Mr Justice Peter Kelly has said.

At the annual lecture of the Hibernian Law Journal, Mr Justice Kelly said that the retirement of a number of talented senior servants in February would put pressure on an already under-resourced system.

“You will have a situation where there will be more judges than registrars,” he said, adding that the moratorium on public sector recruitment in place since 2009 meant that registrars would not be replaced.

Registrars play a key role in the courts system.

Recruited from the Civil Service, they sit with judges during a case and are responsible for administrative duties such as preparing case lists, drafting court orders and swearing in witnesses.

A shortage of registrars could significantly impede the successful running of the courts.

Mr Justice Kelly, the presiding judge of the Commercial Court, also addressed the role of the Commercial Court in the courts system.

Some 1,504 cases have been admitted to the Commercial Court list, since the court was set up as a separate division of the High Court in 2004. Of these, 109 are outstanding, 75 of which are from this year.

The average time in which a case is resolved after its entry into the list is 22 weeks.

“No other Commercial Court in the EU is producing that sort of throughput of cases,” Mr Justice Kelly said.

Ms Justice Mary Finlay Geoghegan, who also sits in the Commercial Court, said that about 43 cases were admitted in the first year of its existence.

This had risen to 373 in 2009, but had fallen to 270 last year. The number of cases admitted up to October this year stands at 150.

Mr Justice Michael Peart noted that 67 per cent of all cases admitted to the Commercial Court were either settled or dismissed at an early stage, although he queried the “cost-effectiveness of litigation” in the court, particularly the rate at which fees were charged by solicitors and counsel.

Mr Justice Kelly said that the nature of the cases entering the Commercial Court in the last number of years had changed, with vendors rather than purchasers now suing.

Much of the activity was now “glorified debt collection” by the banks, he said.