In yet another effort to curb the costs and delays involved in litigation, the Attorney-General announced that the Civil Dispute Resolution Bill will implement key recommendations made by the National Alternative Dispute Resolution Advisory Council (NADRAC) in its November 2009 report, The Resolve to Resolve: Embracing ADR to improve access to justice in the federal jurisdiction (the report). Although the precise content of the Bill has not yet been made public, the report gives some guidance on the sorts of measures likely to be included in the Bill. Cynics of reform however point out that there have been many attempts in the past to make the justice system more quick, cheap and efficient and that they have continuously filed to achieve the outcome by simply adding to the expense of litigation through the extension of the number of boxes which lawyers need to tick before they can initiate litigation. It in some respects also increases the risks that litigants face by abandoning litigation because of concerns about the enormous cost involved. The report by Ronald Sackville in the latter part of the twentieth century concluded that lawyers fees were one of the key elements making the legal system more and more inaccessible to ordinary citizens and this this trend must be curbed in order to ensure that ordinary people would still have access to justice in Australia.

However, looking back on the time intervening since the reforms were suggested there have been many attempts but few successes. The experience of most people who are the clients of law firms is that that the situation is getting worse and that legal costs are getting higher. Compared to inflation, however, legal costs do not actually appear to be going up proportionally to other elements of the cost of living. Although it is now true that many individuals do not factor legal costs into the costs of living because it is so expensive and there is no system of legal costs insurance as there is with medical bills. In any event law appears to be set on another attempt to reform itself and become more efficient.