2021viii10, Tuesday: When 1≠1.

Thank goodness.

There are many bundling crimes which we’ve now become tediously used to since, in March last year, the world caught up with those of us at the Bar who’d already gone paperless.

Now a judge in Manchester - may he be blessed! - has tackled one of the more aggravating ones head on.

It’s page numbering. Yes, I know. Boring. Pernickety. The usual head-of-pin barrister small-mindedness.

If you think this, you’re wrong. Ask yourself how many hearings you’ve been through uttering the litany: “That’s page 47 on paper, my Lady, but page 54 in the PDF.” And waiting while someone, unerringly but understandably, goes to the wrong page. Over. And over. Again.

Thing is, it isn’t hard to get the numbering to match up. As long as there aren’t any last-minute additions, in fact it’s child’s play. In Adobe Acrobat, you can easily make (say) the index pages - and yes, the biggest single crime is forgetting to number the index pages as i-ii-iii, kicking off the actual substantive bundle at page 1. (Open the page thumbnails sidebar down the left hand side of the main window. Click on the menu icon just below the words “Page thumbnails”. Choose “Page labels…”. Pick your page range, select roman instead of arabic numerals, and you’re done.)

In PDF Expert, that isn’t an option - but instead, why not simply start page 1 with the first page of the index, instead of having it in a separate document? (On which subject: separate indexes are the spawn of Satan themselves. One document, please. Including the index. Just the one.)

I won’t go into online bundling services, but frankly if they don’t do this already, they should do. Pronto. (I’ve come to love Casedo, but its page number doesn’t have the option to include its own self-generated table of contents. It really should.)

Even adding pages isn’t too hard (eg “280a, 280b” etc). At least in Acrobat - you can do exactly the same thing. Add the extra pages. Then choose them in the range. Make the starting page the prefix (so “280” in this example). Choose “a, b, c…” from the dropdown. Away you go. Done.

So as HHJ Pearce says in Hodgson v Creation Consumer Finance Ltd, there really isn’t any excuse. The courts - from the Supreme Court down - have said for some time in guidance that this is how they want pagination to work.

And yet I can’t offhand remember a single bundle I’ve been sent by an opposing party (I do my best to work with my solicitors to get it right) that has complied.

The next time, I might be tempted to take a point on it. Using the following from HHJ Pearce at [14]:

Whilst the Courts may have been willing to tolerate problems early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when solicitors were struggling with new challenges, including a lack of the traditional support from those who might assist with preparing bundles, as well as the sudden need to get to grips with the challenges of preparing electronic bundles in all cases, there has been plenty of opportunity by now to get to grips with those challenges. I repeat that most court users have done. Those who have not must realise that they are likely to be sanctioned for the problems caused by such failures.

Costs argument here I come. And I doubt I’ll be the only one.

I mentioned other electronic bundle crimes.

The biggest, of course, is the failure to make the text searchable. ReadIris or Acrobat will usually solve that, but not always.

A close second is the delivery of documents in multiple emails, with further nested emails, instead of in a single PDF bundle: I’ve now taken to including time for putting that together into my fee estimates.

There are myriad others. But honestly: as HHJ Pearce says, we’ve been at this a while now. If a single paper bundle was doable in the past, a single properly-prepared PDF bundle should be doable now. I don’t really think, for professional court users, that there are any excuses left.