Guidance on bundles for Insolvency Hearings

Guidance on bundles for Insolvency Hearings

BUSINESS AND PROPERTY COURTS

IN LEEDS, LIVERPOOL, MANCHESTER AND NEWCASTLE

GUIDANCE ON FORM OF ELECTRONIC BUNDLES

FOR INSOLVENCY HEARINGS

Issued and effective 5 October 2020

  1. This document sets out guidance regarding electronic bundles for hearings of insolvency cases.  The guidance given below is subject to any specific orders and directions given by the Court in any particular case.
  • An electronic hearing bundle must:
    • only contain essential documents;
    • be a single PDF;
    • be fully bookmarked;
    • if convenient, have a hyperlinked index and hyperlinks in any witness statement to any document there referred to;
    • be fully paginated (with the electronic pagination matching the page numbers as displayed on each page);
    • be prepared so that the default view when a document is opened is 100%;
    • display pages so that none need to be rotated in order to be read;
    • have had OCR applied to it so that it can be searched and edited; and
    • be given an electronic file name that identifies it with the relevant case by including at the start the parties’ names in short form and the case number: eg. “Salmon v Trout CR-LDS-2015-00032”.
  • An electronic authorities bundle must:
    • only contain essential authorities;
    • be a single PDF;
    • be fully bookmarked;
    • if convenient, have a hyperlinked index;
    • be prepared so that the default view when a document is opened is 100%;
    • display pages so that none need to be rotated in order to be read;
    • have had OCR applied to it so that it can be searched and edited; and
    • where possible, contain a pdf of the relevant law report in the form it appears in the hard bound version of the law report in question.
  • The hearing bundle and any authorities bundle may be filed at Court by being uploaded to a secure online data storage room and by a link to that data storage room being sent in an email to the Court. Alternatively, the hearing bundle and the authorities bundle may be uploaded to the CE-file system or emailed to the court (NB filing through CE-file can remove some of the capabilities of a pdf (for example hyperlinks)). 
  • If filing through CE-File, use should be made of the “File Description” box to give details of the document uploaded and the hearing date, in order to alert staff.  For example, if uploading a bundle for a hearing, users should input something along the lines of the following into the file description box:

“Bundle for Hearing on 29 October 2020”

  • The maximum size of attached files which can be received by a justice.gov.uk email address is 36Mb in aggregate.  An email with an attached file which is bigger than that, or an email with files which together total more than that in size, will be automatically rejected.  Consideration should be given to compressing (“zipping”) large files. 
  • Once a hearing bundle has been lodged, no alterations should be made to it nor any replacement bundle lodged, without first contacting the Court and enquiring whether the Judge requires (i) a replacement electronic bundle, (ii) an additional electronic bundle, or (iii) some other solution.