The chair of a judicial working party on ‘supercases’ has clarified the status of the list of issues submitted to a judge at the start of Commercial Court cases.

The list does not take legal precedence over the full pleadings, despite consensus among many City litigators that it does, Sir Richard Aikens, who chaired the working party, said this week.

The 2007 report of the Commercial Court Long Trials working party suggested that, once a judge has settled the list of key issues at the first case-management conference, that list ‘will thereafter become, effectively, a court document’.

However, Aikens told a symposium on the implications of the report that the list of issues is a ‘practical document’ with its ‘sole purpose to guide the parties and the judge’.

The pleadings, by contrast, is ‘a formal document’, he told members of the Commercial Litigators Forum, Commercial Bar Association and London Solicitors Litigation Association. ‘Some people seem to have misunderstood this. It is not the intention that you should scrabble to fit in all the issues because you think that, if you don’t get them in the list of issues, you can’t plead them in court.’

The symposium was held in the office of City firm Herbert Smith.