SEDLEY’S LAWS IN THE MODERN AGE: ELECTRONIC BUNDLES “SOME OF THE PAGES MUST APPEAR UPSIDE DOWN, PREFERABLY AT SPORADIC INTERVALS”
The post yesterday on Sedley’s Laws of documents led to me to consider how this should be applied in the modern age. More specifically to electronic bundles. These musings led to contributions from the lawyers of Twitter. We clearly have a foundation for an electronic version of these important set of Laws.
SUGGESTIONS FOR UPDATING SEDLEY’S LAW
Firstly and, obviously,
“The page number on the bundle must never match the PDF number, there must be difference of (at least) three pages”.
Authority for this proposition is here.
Secondly,
“To comply with Supreme Court precedent any paginated numbers in a printed bundle must have a difference of at least 68 pages compared to the electronic bundle”
[Precedent available here civillitigationbrief.com/2019/09/18/wha]
Obviously we have
“Some of the pages must appear upside down, preferably at sporadic intervals”
[Again there is precedent for this here.
Next “If there is a discrepancy between the PDF number and the page number, that discrepancy shall vary between throughout the bundle, and bear no relationship to the index”
[Clear precedent for this again… civillitigationbrief.com/2021/08/03/one]
A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS
There were further suggestions from Twitter.
David Green
Ensure that every email produced in includes all of its earlier chain text below, including all signatures and disclaimers. This must be repeated each time a new email in the chain is separately produced.
Barry Havenhand
But, whilst the first few shall be in chronological order, once you have got the hang of it, they will then be randomised
Paul Smith
Wait – you mean there are people who don’t include 14 pages of disclaimers with every single email in the bundle? Who are these weirdos
David Green
Documents shall preferably have been printed and then re-scanned, so as to reduce their image quality and increase their file size as much as possible.
Luke Gibson
Bundle will have been scanned with the double sided setting on to ensure every other page is blank. Those blank pages will be paginated.
Barry Havenhand
Documents must vary in size in a random way requiring the reader constantly to use the zoom function
WFC
Bookmarks should never be placed by any important documents – and they should always be as chaotically and unhelpfully organised as possible. If Indexes do contain links, they should be to the wrong documents.
Barrister’s Horse
Colour coded tabs help, so long as they’re all yellow.
WFC
And any attempt to run Adobe’s “reduce file size” and/or “recognise text” programmes, on the bundle, shall make it completely illegible.
Stephen V