The Subscription Room at Lloyd’s of London, 1809.
The Commercial Court was created in 1895 specifically for commercial litigation. The Commercial Judges have always adopted a flexible approach to what counts as a commercial dispute, and the Court is used to dealing with a wide variety of cases relating to business and trade.
For many years after 1895, the Court’s work was dominated by the areas of law most closely associated with international trade. The main sectors were transnational sales; bills of exchange, letters of credit and other payment instruments; carriage of goods by sea; and marine insurance. Shipping was particularly prominent, and disputes about freight, laytime and demurrage, cargo claims, and other issues under bills of lading and charterparties often made up half of the Court’s cases. But the Notice as to Commercial Causes deliberately did not define “commercial cause”, and it was left to the Commercial Judges to decide which sorts of case they would hear. From the the very beginning, the Court dealt with a wide variety of work other than international trade, including non-marine insurance, banking and financial services, commercial agency, carriage by rail, and fraud.
The policy of avoiding a fixed definition has been retained under the Civil Procedure Rules. The inclusive list of examples of “commercial claims” in Part 58.1 is not exhaustive, and the Court may hear “any claim arising out of the transaction of trade and commerce”.
A significant number of cases today still relate to shipping and marine insurance. But the profile of work has changed over the years, reflecting shifts in patterns of international business. Banking, financial services, and securities and derivatives transactions now account for a greater proportion of the Court’s caseload, as do commercial fraud and asset recovery. In recent years, the Court has dealt with a growing number of disputes arising out of the deregulation of business and industry in post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. With the development of new technologies, today’s Commercial Judges also frequently deal with cases which would have been unknown to their early predecessors, such as disputes about carriage by air, the development and exploitation of oil and gas fields, the transportation of hydrocarbons, and renewables.
The profile of Commercial Court users has also changed. In 1895, the British merchant navy was the largest afloat, most of the world’s marine insurance was placed in London, and a substantial proportion of Commercial Court litigants were from England & Wales. But a significant number of cases involved overseas parties from the very start, and the number of international litigants increased steadily during the 20th Century as patterns of vessel ownership changed and the distribution of insurance and reinsurance, banking, and other services shifted. Today, about 75% of the Commercial Court’s work is international, reflecting the Court’s global reputation for the resolution of commercial disputes.
Commercial claim includes… any claim relating to:
(a) a business document or contract;
(b) the export or import of goods;
(c) the carriage of goods by land, sea, air or pipeline;
(d) the exploitation of oil and gas reserves or other natural resources;
(e) insurance and re-insurance;
(f) banking and financial services;
(g) the operation of markets and exchanges;
(h) the purchase and sale of commodities; (i) the construction of ships; (j) business agency; and
(k) arbitration.
The Civil Procedure Rules, Part 58.1
The first Commercial Court trial, Burney v Elliman, was a dispute about leaky tanks between a metalworker and the maker of a popular muscle rub.