A well-prepared bundle of joy

District Judge Paul Waterworth explains why there is more to a bundle of documents than a lever arch file

Managing a heavy caseload effectively requires organisation and the regular review of priorities.

However well prepared your case is, in the absence of a settlement, the time will come when the trial bundle will have to be compiled.

It is a good general rule not to delay this task.

A well-prepared bundle, available in good time, gives you the prospect of driving home your advantage in negotiations, and of making a favourable early impression on the court.

During the preparation of a bundle, remember paragraph 3 of the practice direction to the Civil Procedure Rules 1998, part 39 for civil cases, and for family cases, the President's practice direction of 10 March 2000 - Family Proceedings: Court Bundles [2000] 1 FLR 536.

The purposes of a trial bundle are to help clarify what material is before the court and why, give counsel the best prospect of preparing effectively the presentation of the case, facilitate pre-reading by the trial judge and enable the hearing to proceed smoothly and expeditiously.

Help to clarify

Invariably, place at the beginning of the bundle a case summary, a schedule of the issues to be decided by the judge, a chronology, and a draft or summary of the order(s) sought.

Taking the time to prepare these (and often this will involve only a review and if necessary an update of documents prepared for earlier hearings) means focusing on what remains to be resolved, and what you need to do to prove your case.

Send a draft of these documents to your opponent and ask if they are agreed.

You may discover that facts you thought were still in issue are now agreed, such as the value of an asset or a schedule of special damages.

Help the bar

Counsel will need to see quickly what documents are to be relied upon, and, if necessary, draft a skeleton argument.

This important preparatory work often has to be done in a very short time.

Put yourself in counsel's shoes: try to think what information you would want if you had to present the case the next day.

If there is material which needs to be seen by counsel but not by the court - such as Calderbank offers, without-prejudice correspondence, etcetera - this should be included in a separate bundle for counsel's eyes only.

Help the judge

You and the parties are entitled to expect the judge to have familiarised himself with the case and indeed the judge will want to do so.

Contrary to popular belief, the pressure of other cases is such that judicial reading time is limited.

Deliver the bundle to the court in good time.

Ensure that the date of the trial is marked clearly on your covering letter so that the bundle reaches the trial judge quickly.

If the documentation is particularly voluminous, consider creating a separate core bundle containing the most important documents, or at least a reading list directing the judge to those which it is vital to read before the case starts.

Delivering the afternoon before the trial several lever arch files containing hundreds of pages and expecting the judge to have read and assimilated them by the next morning is not a recipe for judicial approval.

The judge will not want to waste time putting the bundle into order.

The importance of the case summary, chronology and schedule of issues at this stage cannot be overstated.

The greatest compliment you can receive is for the judge to quote in his judgment from one or more of these documents.

The bundle should read like a book so that the story unfolds as it will in court.

In ancillary relief cases, it is obligatory to include in the bundle a draft or summary of the order sought.

It will usually be useful to include this in other cases so that the advocate can refer to it when making submissions to the judge.

Make sure there is a copy of the bundle available for witnesses and your opponent (which should have been delivered well in advance).

Witness statements will invariably stand as their evidence in chief and witnesses will be asked to confirm the truth of their statement in the bundle.

Top ten

l A good bundle cannot win a bad case but a good case can be damaged by a bad bundle.

l Include only those documents to be referred to at the hearing.

Disclosure may have produced many pages of documents which are now not at issue and will never be referred to - do not clutter the bundle with copies.

If necessary, check with your opponent.

l Ensure that the lever arch files are still in good working order.

The retaining prongs must close tightly together.

The judge is likely to be irritated by escaping or missing pages or finding it impossible to easily and quickly turn the pages easily and quickly.

l The pagination must be clearly legible (and the same in each copy of the bundle) and the pages in numerical sequence.

l If more than one lever arch file is required, limit each file to 350 pages.

l At the beginning of the first file, include a comprehensive and comprehensible index covering all the files.

If there are more than two files, it is useful to have a separate index for each file as well as the comprehensive index at the beginning of the first file.

Quite apart from ensuring that a document can be found easily during the trial, clear indexing will help the judge locate later a document if judgment has to be reserved.

l Use page dividers to separate parts of the bundle, such as, statements of case, witness statements, experts' reports etcetera.

The bundle will thus be rendered easier to use, and if documents have to be added and numbered later this can be done without disturbing the overall numbering sequence.

l Bundles are required for all civil trials and for family cases listed for more than half a day or at the Royal Courts of Justice, whatever the duration.

Often bundles will be useful for shorter and preliminary hearings.

Case management conference cases are a classic example.

The judge will be helped by a carefully prepared bundle containing the documents required for that hearing, including a draft of the orders sought.

l Try to agree the bundle with the other side.

The inclusion of a document is not necessarily an acceptance of the veracity of the contents but merely an acknowledgement that it is a document to which reference will be made.

l A well-prepared bundle is as much part of the presentation of the case as that which is said in court.

Get it wrong or prepare it sloppily and your case may suffer - so may you, with an unpleasant costs order.

District Judge Paul Waterworth sits at the Coventry Combined Court Centre