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Oh Dear. Mishcon's bundle bungle
Anonymous (not verified) 17 Sep 19 10:55
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The electronic bundle isn't the same as the paper one and the court can't find the documents. Oops

Not a good look, but quite understandable when paginating and numbering bundles of this size., and the little time in which it had to be done. Often it is an IT malfunction....

and every time there is a page ref in the skelly, Pannick now has to add 63, testing his maths, and each time it happens Pannick is apologising profusely and agreeing with the Court how annoying it is.

Someone at Mishcon is going to get totally killed.  I love this. Whole thing really important but the real story is pagination.

 

this resonates with me very strongly.  My bundles were always a work of art and it used to drive me utterly mental when trainees or NQs moaned about having to do bundles and didn't give them the attention that they deserved.

Ultimately it would be for a paralegal/trainee to do the pagination, and I very much doubt a partner checked and went through the hundreds of pages.

Oh no, Pannick is now referring to an authority with no page number!

and actually for a case in the Supreme Court, the partner should have done.

 

I remember being a trainee and having to go to the Hosue of Lords to check all the requirements for the filed documents, there were very strict rules about margins, and binding etc.

I suspect the man on the Clapham omnibus who happened to tune in is utterly baffled.  For those of us who do court work, this is wholly normal.

I would hesitate before blaming some Mishcon trainee.  My money would be on the court staff putting out the wrong bundle.

Nexis there is a mismatch with the Ebundle, the Court staff cannot be held responsible for that?

JC, you reckon a partner should have gone through the ebundle and hard bundle , page by page, bundle by bundle. He would have delegated it, besides paying a partners rate of £600.00 per hour is not a good use of his/her time or the clients legal fees.

You can imagine what would happen, on a detailed assesment , when there is a line in the bill of costs:

100 hours by grade A fee earner and partner, checking pagination........

Nex

There are two issues. First the number stamp is 63 out on all the bench's papers as they have additional items but Pannick's skeleton was marked to the old bundle numbers.

Second, the authorities bundle was added to and the bench don't have the full set in the supplemental one.

Both are causing mayhem. Could be anyone's fault. I wasn't blaming a Mishcon's trainee but I was saying someone at Mishcon is going to get minced.

Yeah ebitda it's not law firms' fault that they overcharge for partners andso are forced to put also very expensive but barely qualified resource on it in one of the most important hearings of all time.  

it's fair to say that somewhere there is at least one junior with their head in their hands.

and an associate who's also got their head in their hands.

and a partner who's about to go mental.

 

yes quite JC.   A partner should ask the senior associate one question:

is the bundling all correct?

All the way down from that each person has to satisfy themselves that they've done their job and got it right. If they cannot answer "yes" with absolute certainty then it's check time. All hands on deck, fook the cost- sort it out in the billing. Everyone sit down and turn the pages / click the pages. Reconcile. 

The impact on brand of fookING IT ALL UP is far greater than the difficulty of billing time spent checking.

partners get paid £600/hr to give legal advice, the admin function should be performed as a freebie - normally delegated to a competent person.  If there's no competent person beneath you roll up your sleeves.

When a trainee presents something I ask "is it correct?". They always say yes, so I tell them to send it out without my review - at which point they always say "umm, maybe I'll check it again".  Once they've done that second check, I'll look it over.

And cringe ofc as the great British public, all of whom are watching, get to tsk tsk at the legal profession.

Whilst ignoring the fact that most of them can't even write anymore.

You can imagine if it was an unremarkable QC who was appearing before the supreme court for the first time, he would have been berated silly. Pannick has been given a pass.

it's a critical admin job.  It should be perfect and the failure is a failure of the firm - but you don't charge partner rates to verify it (or do it), as it's not legal advisory work.

I agree with that, but I agree more with Mutters:

 

"All the way down from that each person has to satisfy themselves that they've done their job and got it right. If they cannot answer "yes" with absolute certainty then it's check time. All hands on deck, fook the cost- sort it out in the billing. Everyone sit down and turn the pages / click the pages. Reconcile. "

I can't wait for the afternoon session. This beats the Ashes by a country mile.  The suspense as we wait for the first post-correctional fookup and the shittergeist takes over the Surpreme Court. Forever after this will be known as "Mishconing something up".  This is more exciting than the question of whether Ben Stokes can rescue England's poor batting performance or Joffra Archer will pop one up Smith's right nostril.

There would of been several conferences as between, the client, instructing solicitors, and leading and junior counsel when they would have gone through stuff ad nauseum in the bundle. Strange nothing amiss was spotted then?

JC, Mischcons are not some tin pot firm, they are a litigation powerhouse apparently. I suspect they do bundling of thousands of pages every week, so they are experienced, even though someone has fvcked up, it isn't because they lack experience in big ticket litigation.

Does anyone who know who the Solicitors are for the other parties? I wouldn't bet against Tsol being found out somewhere along the line?

I am LOVING that every time he pulls up something  from the "Miller Bundle" it bursts like a champagne bottle and he gets a wedge of escapee papers releasing themselves round his desk. This is HILARIOUS.  I am cackling. It's like watching RudeTube Accidental Stunts By Drunk Rednecks when on Crack.

yeah but it looks like the person who did the bundling was a trainee or an NQ who isn't actually an experienced litigator and no-one experienced actually checked the bundle.  

If I had checked that bundle, I would have told them to split it in two before it's finalised especially because everyone knows that there are always last minute additions.

that ought to be irrelevant.  If a firm quotes a fixed fee, it should be a genuine estimate of the case and too bad if you get it wrong etc. but it should never be an excuse to cut corners.

A slightly shit bundle can be great for advocates.  It gets all the attention over their shit advocacy and allows for knowing nods between them and the bench about how shit solicitors, who are a breed of mere mortal and in that sense almost public-like, are compared to them.

yeah but it looks like the person who did the bundling was a trainee or an NQ who isn't actually an experienced litigator and no-one experienced actually checked the bundle.  

It's mid-September. The trainees will have just moved seats and won't have prepared a litigation bundle before, whilst the NQs have probably being doing non-contentious stuff for the last 18 months and forgotten everything.

I note that the bundles don't have nice big stickers on the inside front cover so that it's easy to see which bundle is which when open: much easier for quick access.

lol@JC

Your commentary here indicates you suffered great traumas from your bundling days and probably had a senior who you hated at the time but now respect massively and have to thank for being the finely tuned solicitor you are today.

heh

Call it for the Rebel Alliance. 

 

Parliament had remedies but they are too imprecise and uncertainty and entirely unsuited to a PM playing silly buggers, so judicial intervention necessary. 

IG - there's more truth there than you realise.

Say what you like about us old fookers, but those who learnt their arts before the CPR, when we were using a White Book that held the Rules of the Supreme Court not the Civil Procedure Negotiable Advisory Notices, were in court non stop.

You litigated and orally argued everything.  We were in the Masters' Corridor on time summonses and costs application a few times a week. 

You didn't like what they other side had written in their pleading? You asked for Further and Better Particulars. They declined to give them. You said you'd issue a summons and seek costs if they didn't (in a aggressive letter). They didn't, and called your bluff. So you issued a summons and off you went on the return date and got an order compelling it, with costs. 

They then didn't comply and you got a final order, with further costs, then again for an Unless order. You then applied to strike out their claim, which they contested, and eventually they got leave to amend by some lucky break, and the next chapter began 14 days later when they served the new pleading. Then you did likewise and so did they.

All of that was heard orally, hearing after hearing. For each one, and the costs application to support it, and the assessment hearings that inevitably followed all of that, you had to prepare the papers.  Your affidavits (no, they were not witness statements) were sworn, with sworn exhibits, and sewn up (i.e. bound). Originals were available at court. All copy materials were bundled, paginated and filed. We had manual stamps so you checked each page as you stamped it.  You checked each set of bundles in a team. You checked your skeleton argument cross references against the bundle.  You made sure it was ok. 

Once in a while a mistake was made when a new authority was slipped in over night by counsel and someone cocked up by not repaginating ALL copies of the bundle, or you couldn't get to the court copy, or the judge's clerk had not replaced the old one with the new, and your life was in free fall for 10 minutes. 

You just learned to GET. IT. RIGHT.

Get it right is my mantra. But I’m heartened that bundling shitstorms occur outside crime. Crown court judge would have ripped Pannick’s head off by now. 

Re the sticker; I have a similar system with different coloured ring binders depending on whether law, statements, cross examination etc. 

Hear, hear.

Oddly, I recall hanging around with some pals from a union firm just pre-CPR, and they were saying "This is all nonsense, let's just have the 'Old Boys Rules': we'll do statements and schedules when we feel like it, and agree it among ourselves. These new time limits are unrealistic and awful."

This was, you may have gathered, the boozy lunch crew. 

None of them lasted very long after CPR came in.

Bailey as I said , if it was an unremarkable silk appearing in the SC for the first time they would have hammered him.

Seperatley the remedy they are seeking is a declaration that the advice given to the queen was illegal.

As a long-suffering litigator I can confirm that preparing a bundle is the hardest part of the job. It is probably the hardest part of any lawyers job including judges and counsel. Just because it is administrative, does not mean it is easy, and it is far too easy to overlook how hard it can be or to rely on junior people to do it. Pretty much every bundle I have received from juniors has been hideous first time around, but at least I know hw hard it is and don’t lay in to them as I expect someone at Mishcon will be doing later.

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