A leap forward not yet achieved: Civil procedure reform in Taiwan

Inheriting the legal legacy of Continental systems, Taiwanese civil procedure law is essentially closer in design to the inquisitorial mode than the adversarial mode, as represented by the US law system. This means that the litigation process is theoretically mostly controlled by judges rather than led by the parties. 1 However, in the practice, litigants still exert a quite substantial influence on the pace of litigation in Taiwan. 2 Taiwan’s Code of Civil Procedure (“TCCP”) gives the court limited control with regard to when to conclude a case, and it must wait until the parties agree that all the evidence and issues have been investigated and addressed. 3 Therefore, the court generally hears several cases at the same time. 4 This creates hurdles for efficiency in litigation. If the parties abuse their liberty to control the pace of proceedings, they delay the progress of litigation, wasting resources and time. Some litigants even keep some evidence from being unveiled at the first instance in order to ambush the opposingparty with new facts at the second instance. 5 These problems may cause the first trial to lose its theoretical function of being the first true airing of all the facts that serves as the best opportunity to resolve disputes.