really expensive legal researchers

Lindner v Rawlins 2015

http://www.familylaw.co.uk/news_and_comment/lindner-v-rawlins-2015-ewca-civ-51#.VNymu_msVic

In this case, the Court of Appeal were dealing with an appeal from a husband relating to divorce proceedings about a Judge’s refusal to order the police to provide him with information / a statement.  There had been a complaint from the wife (or the wife’s new partner, hence the husband’s interest) about an allegation of criminal damage to a Sky tv satellite dish.

The husband had done a lot of legal research, but was sadly relying on the Civil Procedure Rules and a case called Durham County Council v Dunn [2012] EWCA Civ 1654 which relates to the duties of disclosure and inspection owed by one party in litigation to the other.  Neither were really relevant in this case, which was Family Procedure Rules and relating to an order for disclosure against a third party.  I personally think that the husband had made a pretty decent fist of assembling his case, he’d just started from the wrong assumptions.

The Court of Appeal refused the appeal, but this is the relevant bit and why it is worth reporting.

The second observation is in no way a criticism of the husband who presented his case to us courteously and as comprehensively as he could. Nevertheless, the fact that he was not represented meant that he had approached it on a mistaken basis. The task that would normally have been fulfilled by the parties’ legal representatives, of finding relevant documents amongst the material presented, and researching the law and its application to the facts of the case, had to be done by the judges of the Court of Appeal instead. This is not a satisfactory state of affairs as the time taken to attend to this is considerable and cannot be spared in what is already a very busy court.

And

I agree with the judgment of Black LJ. I also wish, wholeheartedly, to endorse her observation at [32]. The procedural issue with which this appeal is concerned is technical and unusual. The husband could not be expected to have mastered this area of the law in order to be able to present his appeal in a way that assisted the court. The wife was neither present nor represented. Yet again, the court was without any legal assistance and had to spend time researching the law for itself then attempting to apply it to the relevant facts in order to arrive at the correct legal answer. To do the latter exercise meant that the court itself had to trawl through a large amount of documents in the file. All this involves an expensive use of judicial time, which is in short supply as it is. Money may have been saved from the legal aid funds, but an equal amount of expense, if not more, has been incurred in terms of the costs of judges’ and court time. The result is that there is, in fact, no economy at all. Worse, this way of dealing with cases runs the risk that a correct result will not be reached because the court does not have the legal assistance of counsel that it should have and the court has no other legal assistance available to it.

It is quite easy to read this as a kicking to Chris[tian] Gray-ling and the devillish torments he has assembled for justice in his Red Room (and there’s an image you will be stuck with for the rest of the day, sorry), but I’m not quite sure that it is.

We don’t specifically get told what the husband does for a living, but we do know that there is a matrimonial home of a size for a family of four (husband, wife, two kids) and that it is in the Bromley area (because that was the original Court), so one might hazard a guess that to obtain and sustain a mortgage both parties would probably fall outside of the income limits for legal aid, even before the reforms. The husband is clearly bright and capable – one might criticise him for focussing his intellect in the wrong direction rather than moving on, but that’s by the by.

If I were staking money on it, it would be that this husband would not have qualified for free legal advice and representation even before Chris Grayling got his hands on the legal reins and made his changes of course.

If this was supposed to be an economy though, it isn’t. The Legal Aid Agency might have saved a few thousand in legal fees for someone to research and advise the husband (and they’d have advised against an appeal) but the taxpayer overall has lost out because three very senior Judges had to spend valuable time researching and working out the proper basis for the appeal and whether or not it should be granted.