PI Brief Update

Feral Justice

Word has it in the robing rooms that there’s a particular county town in which the district judges have all gone what can only be described as feral. Now don’t get me wrong. There has always been the odd (in all senses of the word) one here and there and we’ve all known who they were. In fact if you were advising your clients as to the likely outcomes it was something which seriously had to be factored into the equation. One, for example, simply didn’t like women claimants and another hated anyone with a regional accent. But it was generally considered pretty bad luck to get one of these judges since even at their own courts they were only one out of four or five who were dishing out the justice.

Not so in this particular county town where every one of the district and deputy district judges have pretty much declared independence, Passport to Pimlico style. It started with the publication of their so-called ‘Local Practice Directions’ in which skeleton arguments and bundles of authorities were “discouraged”. For that, read not merely “frowned upon” but instead “actively ignored”. Then there’s the policy that “personal injury cases are encouraged to settle” for which read “if they don’t settle, there’ll be wasted costs against the lawyers”. Oh, and just the small matter of cross-examination and submissions for which the directions say “Judges may dispense with these is they deem it appropriate”. For this read “We can’t be bothered with you testing the evidence or going on too much so we’ll just decide the cases our way thank you very much.”

BabyBarista is a fictional account of a junior barrister written by Tim Kevan. You can buy the latest BabyBarista novel, 'Law and Peace' on Amazon. The cartoons are by Alex Williams, author of The Queen's Counsel Lawyer's Omnibus.