Day 274 - 04 Jul 96 - Page 07
1 statement I have just made.
2
3 MR. MORRIS: I thought that applied to our own documents.
4
5 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Not necessarily, because there may be a
6 document which has been produced by the other side which
7 you want to rely on, but which does not have any formal
8 standing in evidence at the moment and which therefore you
9 have got to have agreed. It may be that some of the
10 documents which have been produced could stand as
11 "admissions" on behalf of the plaintiffs, or you could use
12 them as such.
13
14 MR. MORRIS: That was my understanding, that if the plaintiffs
15 produced documents in this case that are favourable to our
16 side, as they are all effectively - what is the word -
17 accepted as official actual McDonald's documents, then
18 anything contained in those documents that is favourable to
19 us is automatically evidence that we can rely on.
20
21 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Well, that --
22
23 MR. MORRIS: We would not need to search through thousands of
24 documents.
25
26 MR. JUSTICE BELL: That may or may not be so. And I am not
27 going to decide matters of admissibility generally at
28 large. I would have to decide it in respect of any
29 particular document. I am certainly not going to have
30 prolonged argument this month on whether this document or
31 that document is. Unless you get agreement, you risk a
32 document not going in.
33
34 Now, so far as documents produced by McDonald's are
35 concerned, it may be there is nothing much you can do about
36 that, because you certainly do not have the wherewithal
37 formally to prove it in any event.
38
39 MR. MORRIS: No, that is true.
40
41 MR. JUSTICE BELL: So what you are put back on is some argument,
42 there may be other arguments under the Civil Evidence Act,
43 and I am certainly not pretending to be omniscient about
44 this, it just is not my job to tidy up the cases on either
45 side as to which evidence you want to prove. But you will
46 remember that I said soon after the 18th March 1996 list
47 was produced by Barlow Lyde & Gilbert that you really ought
48 to make sure that the most important documents that you
49 wanted to rely on, whether produced by McDonald's
50 themselves or produced by you or your witnesses, were in
51 fact agreed.
52
53 There is a fairly easy solution to all this, as I suggested
54 on a previous occasion; that is, that if the other side has
55 produced a document which appears to have useful facts
56 which may be interpreted one way or the other in it, and if
57 the side to whom it is produced thinks the producing side
58 would probably be able to prove that formally if we put
59 them to it, then the easy route is to admit it.
60
