Getting an authorities bundle agreed and finalised for the Court of Appeal can be a stressy pain.
Agreeing a list of authorities and compiling PDF and hard copies of the bundle isn’t too bad. A lot of the guidance in 10 easy steps to creating the perfect hearing bundle is relevant to the practicalities of things like shuffling the authorities into date order, producing an index and making sure the pagination and page labels line up. The bit that can be tiresome is getting everyone’s sidelining marking the passages on which they rely onto the same PDF copy of the bundle before it is printed and delivered to the court.
One way (perhaps the usual way) of doing this is to send the PDF authorities bundle round all the different parties in turn, for each of them to add their sidelining one by one. If the bundle is in several volumes, it’s likely to be quicker if the different volumes take different routes round the parties — so that, say, A can be marking up volume 1 while B is marking up volume 2 and C is marking up volume 3. And then everyone swaps round, and hopefully you end up with everyone’s markings on each volume.
I suppose in theory it could all go like clockwork. But if someone is slow, or the PDFs circulate for some reason in an unexpected order, or someone doesn’t read the instructions carefully enough and annotates the wrong volume at the wrong moment, it can go wrong a bit like a bad rehearsal for the criss-crossy thing they do with cannons at the Edinburgh Tattoo.
If this description brings you out in a clammy sweat of remembered stress, I am your bundle fairy, and I am here to make your life better next time.
- Start with a folder, in OneDrive or some other location you can easily share with the other parties. Call it “joint authorities bundle” or something of the kind. Save in it court-ready PDFs of all the authorities you rely on, each one named with its full citation, prefixed with its year (or year and month, if you have a cluster of authorities from a single year), eg “2015 BBC v Roden [2015] ICR 985.pdf”. (Prefixing the names with the year and including the full citation is to force sorting in date order, and to make it easy to extract a draft index from the file list: see further 10 easy steps.)
- Add sidelining to the PDFs to mark the passages you rely on as you go along.
- Share your folder with the other parties. Ask them to add any authorities they rely on that aren’t already on your list, named in the same way, and sidelined for the passages they rely on.
- Read the guidance at paragraph 29 of Practice Direction 52C.
- Bin most of your authorities.
- Once your collection is complete (and pruned as necessary) merge the reports, ready-sidelined, into a single PDF and add an index page.
- Sort out page labels and pagination, and hyperlink the index to the first page of each report. Again, you can adapt the instructions from 10 easy steps for this: the principle’s the same. The individual authorities are now clutter, so move them out of your shared folder (though probably not to the bin, just in case of mishap).
- Check whether you want to sideline any passages from the authorities contributed by the other parties, and do so if you want to.
- Invite the other parties to do the same with yours, and each other’s. Unfortunately (anyway in OneDrive – I haven’t tried alternatives) you can’t actually all do this at the same time without using snazzy collaboration tools, but if everyone’s marked up their own authorities before putting them in the shared folder, there probably won’t be very much more to do at this stage. If it’s at all complicated, I’d suggest sharing a schedule of time slots, asking everyone to mark the window within which they plan to do any further sidelining, and then stick to those times.
- Once everyone’s added any further sidelining, you’re done.