Over the past few weeks, a theme has been emerging on this page about the profession’s veritable obsession with the correct use of language. But it transpires that it is not only solicitors of the Supreme Court who get hot and bothered about the use and abuse of English; their esteemed colleagues on the bench feel the same way, as Lord Justice Beatson demonstrated last week.

Hearing the Law Society’s judicial review of the Legal Services Commission’s family tender process, Beatson took exception to the use of the word ‘cascading’, which he said littered all the advocates’ skeleton arguments.

The offending word had been used to refer to the way in which the LSC distributed contracts to successful bidders. Work was given to firms that scored the highest number of points, and where there was more work on offer than the firms had bid for, the rest was ‘cascaded’ to the next-highest-scoring firms, until all the work was allocated.

Adjourning the case, Beatson advised all present to find a good dictionary and look up the meaning of the word. He suggested a more appropriate phraseology would be ‘winner takes it all with a trickle-down effect’, though in all honesty that can hardly be described as elegant. ‘Loose language will not help us deal with this expeditiously,’ he grumbled.

Warming to his theme, Beatson observed that the documents submitted in the case had themselves ‘cascaded’ – there were seven volumes of evidence, which included witness statements from 125 firms in support of the Law Society (only one firm, Lincoln practice Sills & Betteridge, filed a statement supporting the LSC).

When the case came back to court, Lord Justice Moses, sitting with Beatson, was also exercised about semantics, complaining that some of the documents were written in ‘a language I can’t understand’. Since it has been some years since Moses last took a legal aid brief, he was not quite au fait with the meaning of terms like ‘new matter starts’, ‘certified work’ and ‘remainder work’ that have become the everyday parlance of those working in legal aid. Doubtless he will be all too familiar with those terms by the end of proceedings.