In June this year the Brisbane Supreme Court announced it would be trialling for 12 months a system of pre-trial case management. This system is to ensure every civil matter is subject to court supervision from the time the Request for Trial Date (RFTD) is filed until it is assigned to a Judge, several weeks before trial.

The purpose of the process is to avoid delay which can occur in civil matters once the RFTD is filed. Currently the Caseflow Management System deals with some matters but once the RFTD is filed the claim is no longer subject to the Caseflow process. The lack of case supervision between the time the RFTD is filed and the trial can lead to additional cost and delay to the parties.

The new process to be trialled will mean that every matter is subject to Court supervision once the RFTD is filed. On 4 September 2017 the Court appointed a Resolution Registrar, Ms Julie Tiffin who will mange the new system, which will entail two case management conferences.The first such conference will require the parties to submit certain documents including a List of Issues; a Statement of Matters not in Dispute; a Trial Plan and an Index to an Agreed Bundle of Documents. At that conference the Registrar will identify any inadequacies in the documents and allocate dates for trial.

The second conference will be convened about 6 weeks prior to trial at which time the parties are to agree all documents submitted at the first conference are up to date and to record their plan for the conduct of the trial. It is at the end of that conference that the matter will be allocated to a Judge, who will then supervise the matter.

It is to be noted that cases requiring supervision by a Judge, or which are estimated to take more than 5 days to hear, will continue to be placed on the Supervised Case List.

The Court and the Registry see the benefits of the new system to be threefold:

  1. Avoid or reduce waste of Court resources and costs to the parties of inappropriate allocation of dates for trial and/or by the forced adjournment of trials;
  2. The information gathered will assist in the allocation of matters to Trial Judges; and
  3. Trials will be prepared and run more efficiently resulting in time and costs savings.