Read carefully, the Final Report is not just about delay, backlog, or modernization. It is an implicit admission that access to justice was not lost overnight. It was eroded gradually, by custom, by habit, and by procedures that once served a purpose but slowly became obstacles in their own right.
This is not a radical document. It is, in many respects, a corrective one.
When Procedure Stopped Serving the Public
For much of my career, access to justice was discussed as though it were synonymous with self-represented litigants. That framing was always too narrow. In my view, the real access-to-justice crisis has long lived in the middle ground, among ordinary litigants who technically had counsel, but for whom the cost of getting to a meaningful outcome steadily outpaced the value of the dispute.
The Final Report acknowledges, without quite saying so directly, that procedure became decoupled from proportionality. Steps multiplied. Appearances became routine rather than purposeful. Motions evolved from problem-solving tools into leverage points. None of this happened because lawyers or judges acted in bad faith. It happened because the system rewarded process, not resolution.
I still remember assignment courts packed wall-to-wall, with experienced counsel lining up simply to announce their presence, fill out slips, and ask for dates. Entire mornings burned to accomplish what could now be done in minutes. At the time, this was accepted as the cost of doing things properly. In hindsight, it was a quiet form of exclusion.
The Middle-Class Litigant Problem
One of the most important, and least discussed, aspects of the Final Report is its recognition that access to justice is not binary. It is not a question of having a lawyer or not having one. It is about whether the system delivers value that is commensurate with the dispute.
For years, the civil justice system functioned tolerably well for very small cases and very large ones. The casualties were everything in between. Modest personal injury claims. Employment disputes. Estate conflicts. Commercial disagreements where the legal fees threatened to eclipse the amount at stake.
The Report’s emphasis on proportional procedures, streamlined tracks, and earlier intervention is an acknowledgment that a system that only works for the extremes is not working at all.
Reform as Restoration, Not Revolution
There is a tendency to talk about these reforms as though they represent a dramatic departure from tradition. I don’t see it that way. What the Final Report proposes is not a dismantling of safeguards, but a re-alignment of them.
Fairness was never meant to be synonymous with friction. Due process was never intended to require exhaustion. The idea that justice must be slow and expensive to be legitimate is not a principle. It is a myth that crept in over time.
In that sense, the reforms are conservative in the truest meaning of the word. They conserve what matters, namely fairness, transparency, and accountability, while trimming away the procedural overgrowth that made those values harder to reach.
A Mediator’s Perspective on Access
From a mediation standpoint, the access-to-justice implications are particularly striking. The Report recognizes, implicitly and explicitly, that late-stage mediation often arrives after positions have hardened and costs have distorted judgment.
Earlier, structured mediation is not about forcing settlement. It is about restoring realism. When parties engage before sunk costs dominate decision-making, the conversation changes. I believe that risk assessment will improve. Outcomes will tend to align more closely with merits rather than momentum.
That said, this shift will require adjustment. Fewer procedural choke points mean less opportunity for pressure by attrition. Credibility issues may surface later. Preparation will matter more than performance. None of this undermines justice, but it will change the skills that are rewarded.
What the Report Does Not Say—But Implies
Perhaps the most telling aspect of the Final Report is what it leaves unsaid. It does not accuse the profession of bad faith. It does not frame the problem as moral failure. Instead, it suggests something more difficult to accept, that we normalized inefficiency because it was familiar.
Access to justice was not blocked by a single rule or institution. It was crowded out by accumulated practices that no one stopped to question.
The reforms now proposed ask the profession to do something deceptively hard, to let go of steps that feel reassuring, even when they no longer serve the people they were meant to protect.
Looking Ahead
Read this way, I think that the Final Report is less a crisis document than a recalibration. It invites us to remember that the justice system exists to resolve disputes, not to host them indefinitely.
Access to justice, properly understood, is not about speed alone. It is about timely, proportionate, and intelligible resolution. That goal is neither new nor radical. It is foundational.
The challenge now is whether the profession is willing to unlearn as much as it has learned, and to accept that restoring access may require doing fewer things, not more.