The Disclosure Review Working Group has extended the deadline for responses to its survey on the operation of the disclosure process in the Business and Property Courts.

The review seeks to take stock of the effectiveness of the current regime, which represented a significant overhaul when it was first introduced on 1 January 2019 as a pilot scheme (PD51U) before becoming permanent on 1 October 2022 as PD 57AD.

At the time of its introduction, the new system was intended, as Sir Geoffrey Vos put it when he was Chancellor of the High Court, “to effect a culture change…driven by reasonableness and proportionality”. As the review explains, this meant achieving the goals of (i) saving costs, (ii) improving the accuracy of disclosure, (iii) reducing the burden on the courts of resolving issues of disclosure, and (iv) promoting a culture change of more cooperation between litigants.

Six years after the scheme was first introduced, the Disclosure Working Group is asking how well it has achieved these aims, as well as how developments in technology are affecting the disclosure process.

The survey addresses all aspects of the disclosure process, asking, for example, whether the new system has in fact reduced costs or whether they continue to go up, in part due to the increase in the volume and complexity of data sets. Related to this, the Group considers whether there is a case for the mandatory use of Technology Assisted Review (TAR) or AI tools where a data set exceeds a certain number of documents. It also addresses matters such as the use of Initial Disclosure, the effectiveness of Models for Disclosure, and whether the obligations to preserve documents are too onerous.

The deadline for submissions is now 3 February 2026. To read more, click here.