“AN UNWIELDLY COLLECTION OF COURT DOCUMENTS”: A JUDGMENT THAT ENDS THE “BUNDLE DROUGHT”
It has been six months since this blog featured a complaint about trial bundles. That barren period is ended by some observations of Costs Judge Leonard in Griffin v Kleyman & Co Solicitors Ltd *[2024] EWHC 1151 (SCCO). The bundle was found to be “unwieldly”. Further the page references given by the advocate did not match the page numbers in the bundle given to the judge
“I found it to comprise an unwieldy collection of court documents and correspondence coming to some 1,676 pages, not all in date order and with elements of duplication, much too large to pick through in the hope of finding everything of evidential significance.”
THE CASE
The judge was determining a preliminary issue relating to estimates in a solicitor-client assessment. Shortly before the hearing the Defendant produced a supplemental bundle.
THE JUDGE’S OBSERVATIONS ON THE SUPPLEMENTAL BUNDLE
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- I should mention that the directions for the hearing of this issue provided for the parties’ witness evidence to be complete before the end of November 2023, and for an agreed bundle (the “core bundle”) to be filed seven days before the hearing on 23 January 2024. About 10 days before the hearing, the Defendant produced a supplemental bundle of documents not referred to in the witness evidence. The Claimant’s representatives, understandably, objected to that.
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The compromise reached was that the supplemental bundle would not be referred to in oral evidence but that I could bear its contents in mind in the course of preparing my judgment, attaching such weight as seemed appropriate to documentation not referred to in witness evidence and not necessarily comprehensive.
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- Given that its contents were likely to be contentious, I had not reviewed the supplemental bundle before the hearing. Upon doing so, I found it to comprise an unwieldy collection of court documents and correspondence coming to some 1,676 pages, not all in date order and with elements of duplication, much too large to pick through in the hope of finding everything of evidential significance. Mr Silva did refer me to some specific documents in his written closing submissions, but the page references given by him do not seem to match the documents in my copy of the supplemental bundle.
*We will be looking at the substantive decision in this case in the next post on this blog.