Day 050 - 10 Nov 94 - Page 46
1 potential witnesses on employment. I know I raised it
2 before, and I think my suggestion that the Defendants
3 should call their evidence, exceptionally, before ours was
4 rather frowned on by your Lordship for reasons which I can
5 perfectly well understand. I am not making that submission
6 again.
7
8 However, it is my belief that it may be that that is only a
9 list of potential witnesses. What I do not want to do is
10 to spend a month or six weeks calling evidence in rebuttal
11 in advance of witnesses who are not, in fact, going to be
12 called.
13
14 What I ask is this, that before Christmas -- not now but
15 before Christmas -- we are given at any rate a provisional
16 list of those witnesses the Defendants know are not going
17 to be called and those that they think are going to be
18 called, so that we can decide which of our witnesses we
19 need to organise, remembering always that they come from
20 all over the country on both sides.
21
22 MR. MORRIS: I do not know what he means, but it is certainly
23 our intention to call all our witnesses.
24
25 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes. I would like to come back to that topic
26 sometime early in December. But, for my own purposes as
27 well as anything else, that sometime in December we have to
28 make the best available estimate of how long the rest of
29 the evidence is going to take. That is purely and simply
30 mentioning at this stage for my own reasons.
31
32 What I propose to do is complete the evidence, subject to
33 argument from any of you, and then have a break of a period
34 of time (which will be in weeks rather than days) before
35 speeches begin. I am not saying it will be very many
36 weeks, but we will have to discuss it. What I want is some
37 picture, however inaccurate it may turn out to be, of when
38 we expect to finish the evidence so I have some idea of
39 when the gap of however long it will be will be.
40
41 MR. RAMPTON: That is one reason I mentioned what I did just now
42 because, plainly, it will affect the overall length of the
43 case, or may do, quite considerably.
44
45 MS. STEEL: There is one thing that we have been talking about
46 for a while and we wanted to bring up, the subject about
47 the affidavits on discovery, because it was ordered that
48 they be served two weeks before the relevant witnesses give
49 their evidence to give them a reasonable length of time to
50 prepare them. Those witnesses originally were scheduled
51 for September and October, so now they have actually had
52 more than that time.
53
54 We were going to ask whether there could be a fixed date
55 some time around Christmas, so that we would get a chance
56 to read those affidavits over the Christmas period, and to
57 do any necessary preparations surrounding them, rather than
58 just, you know, having them in the middle of when we are
59 already trying to be on top of evidence and
60 cross-examination and things like that.
