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The Federal Council is sticking to the basic outlines of the preliminary draft. According to the draft, advances on court costs are to be halved, which will reduce the de facto barrier to access to court for small and medium-sized businesses. In future, the state should bear the collection risk of the other party and no longer the parties themselves. This is the aim of the new regulation on the liquidation of legal costs. As a result, the costs of the proceedings are to be offset against the advances made by the party liable to pay costs.Among other things, selective adaptations are intended to improve legal certainty and legal clarity in private law and thus strengthen the user-friendliness of the ZPO. For example, in addition to the selective adjustments already proposed in the preliminary draft, family procedural law is to be improved in further points and the most important findings of federal court rulings are to be anchored in law in the future. A new right to refuse to cooperate is also to be introduced for in-house counsel.In order to facilitate the efficient and coordinated enforcement of multiple claims and their joint assessment, the provisions on counterclaims, cumulation of claims, joinder of parties and third-party proceedings should be adapted on a case-by-case basis.

The conciliation procedure should be used in additional disputes and give the conciliation authorities more powers to propose decisions. In other property disputes, the arbitration authority will now be able to make a proposal for a decision up to a value in dispute of CHF 10,000 (previously CHF 5,000).

The proposals to strengthen the collective redress of mass and scattered damage, which were disputed in the consultation process, will be removed from the proposal and dealt with separately.