Day 172 - 12 Oct 95 - Page 44
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2 MR. MORRIS: Right.
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4 MR. JUSTICE BELL: In some cases I would welcome positive help;
5 for instance, surveys, which were mentioned in the past.
6 But that is another topic.
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8 MR. RAMPTON: Can I say, it might help if I said a word about
9 that. We -- Mrs. Brinley-Codd and I -- have been working
10 on that problem intermittently since about July, and it
11 started off with a sort of a ramble through what we called
12 computer documents. The problem is they are a very great
13 deal bigger than that on both sides. The reason is that
14 there is an awful lot of material of second or third
15 generation before your Lordship. Sometimes it has been
16 made by the witness who has identified the sources, but
17 even that does not really cure the problem. But very often
18 it has not.
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20 All these documents, whether they are computer generated or
21 generated by human beings directly, could be strictly
22 proved as evidence of the truth of their contents by an
23 enormously costly and laborious, though not in the least
24 bit difficult intellectually, machinery under the Civil
25 Evidence Act. But it would take a very, very long time and
26 an awful lot of effort to do it.
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28 What we are proposing to do is to produce a list of all the
29 documents on our side -- we are not doing to do the
30 Defendants'; they must do those that they want to rely on;
31 we are not going to undertake that -- produce a list of all
32 the documents that are before your Lordship in one form or
33 another, whether any appendices to the statements or in the
34 trial bundles, that we think are of that character and will
35 strictly need validating by a Civil Evidence Act notice but
36 which we wish to rely on and would invite the Defendants
37 not just to take a technical objection for the sake of
38 making a nuisance, because if they do that there is a
39 further stage; your Lordship always has a discretion under
40 the rules to dispense with all the formalities of the Civil
41 Evidence Act requirements under the rules and simply admit
42 the evidence. When we have finished the task we will
43 present that list with references so that everybody knows
44 what it is, what the document is that we would like your
45 Lordship to take into account.
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47 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Might I suggest that as soon as you have
48 completed the list, or think you have completed the list,
49 you raise it rather than waiting any longer.
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51 MR. RAMPTON: Of course.
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53 MR. JUSTICE BELL: So that we can discuss the matter further
54 with the actual list in mind.
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56 MR. RAMPTON: That is why it has taken us so long. It is a
57 devil of a job because there are so many of them, and it
58 certainly needs completing before ever we get to closing
59 speeches.
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