England’s most senior family judge has warned lawyers to stop making their bundles too large.
In a stern rebuke to a solicitor who brought a 591-page bundle into court in In the matter of L (A Child) [2015] EWFC 15, Sir James Munby said: “The professions need to recognise that enough is enough.”
The case involved a father who spoke only Slovene and required the bundle to be translated at a cost of £0.102 per word before he could take part in the proceedings. Due to the length of the bundle, this would cost more than £23,000. However, the Legal Aid Authority (LAA) refused to pay on the grounds it was unnecessary.
Sir James, President of the Family Division, held that the man needed only to be aware of the “important substance” of the case not the fine detail, and ordered his solicitor to construct a summary of no more than 30 pages.
He said Practice Direction 27A specified that bundles should be “contained in one A4 size ring binder or lever arch file limited to no more than 350 sheets of A4 paper and 350 sides of text”. The bundle before him was “well over 2 ½ times that size,” he said, which was did not surprise him as “PD27A is frequently, indeed in some places almost routinely, ignored”.
He encouraged case management judges to specify the maximum length of a skeleton argument, witness statement or other document. Defaulters would be publicly named in judgments, and exposed to financial penalties or sanctions.
The practice of bringing second, witness bundles into court would no longer be accepted, he said, and counter-staff at court offices would be instructed to refuse to accept them, unless a judge had specifically directed that they be lodged. Witness bundles sent by post would be destroyed.
Sir James said: “This endemic failure of the professions to comply with PD27A must end, and it must end now.”
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