This chapter is concerned with court orders made prior to final judgment, and with enforcement of final judgments. These are matters of civil procedure. They do not deal with final determinations of rights and are not remedies in the technical sense. Rather, they protect the ability of the court to award remedies.

First, if there is a dispute over certain subject matter, it is important that the subject matter of the dispute be maintained until the court can adjudicate the dispute. This is where interlocutory remedies and pre-judgment remedies are relevant. These remedies are awarded before the court makes a final determination of the proceedings and are generally intended to maintain the status quo pending the decision. Such remedies include interlocutory injunctions, which restrain or compel a person to do a particular thing. There are other pre-judgment remedies, such as freezing orders and search orders, which prevent the defendant from removing property from the jurisdiction or from destroying evidence before proceedings can be brought. These ensure that proceedings are not nugatory.

Secondly, after final judgment has been handed down, there must be a means of ensuring that the judgment debtor does what the court has ordered; otherwise the judgment lacks ‘teeth’. Courts have coercive mechanisms which ensure that a defendant complies with an order to pay damages or an order of specific relief.

This chapter deals with court orders made prior to final judgment and with enforcement of final judgments. These are matters of civil procedure and are not remedies in the technical sense. They protect the ability of courts to award remedies in two ways. First, if a particular subject matter needs to be protected before judgment, interlocutory remedies can achieve that goal. Secondly, after final judgment has been handed down, courts must be able to ensure that the defendant does what they were ordered to do, for example by seizing assets to pay for an outstanding judgment debt.

This chapter recognises the practical reality that in high-value, cross-border commercial litigation it is frequent to see claimants making applications for more than one type of interim relief. In addition to a freezing injunction and an ancillary disclosure order, the complexity of the facts and the defendant’s conduct may lead the claimant to apply for an anti-suit injunction, an anti-enforcement injunction, a Norwich Pharmacal order and/or a receivership order. It is suggested that this potential for a ‘kitchen sink’ approach to interim relief raises concerns about the financial pressure on defendants, the pressure on the English courts, and the consistency of the courts’ reasoning relating to the extraterritorial scope of interim relief. The significance of taking into account the pressure on the courts cannot be underestimated as the potential for delays resulting from interim relief may undermine access to justice. The chapter examines the relationship between freezing injunctions and other types of interim relief.