Day 149 - 06 Jul 95 - Page 20
1 either the pleadings or the Defendants' witness statements
2 give to rise to.
3
4 Having done that exercise, we excluded matters which were
5 not, detailed matters, which were not in issue on the
6 pleadings, by which I include the Defendants' witness
7 statements.
8
9 That means, for example -- and these are all examples --
10 everything relating to the dangers of electricity to the
11 dangers of filtering the shortening to the problems caused
12 by slips and falls, and so on, has been left in. If, for
13 example, there had been -- there was not, but if there had
14 been, for example -- a note that some employee had been
15 bitten by a snake in a restaurant in the West of Scotland,
16 that would have come out. It is really as simple as that.
17
18 We have, we believe, adhered strictly to the Court of
19 Appeal's guidelines. Therefore, unless the Defendants can
20 show that there must be something in there which is
21 actually relevant, as opposed to something they might like
22 to see and make a case of which they do not have, my Lord,
23 then we are entitled to have done what we did.
24
25 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Do you have the reference to the case in
26 which Hoffmann L.J. gave -- I probably have it in a pile of
27 cuttings in my room.
28
29 MR. RAMPTON: I have it somewhere, but where the file is --
30 I have a file which has all that in it.
31
32 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I think Ms. Steel has it. All I need is the
33 date of The Times on the top of the page.
34
35 MS. STEEL: Wednesday, 3rd August, 1994.
36
37 MR. JUSTICE BELL: What is the name of the case?
38
39 MS. STEEL: GE Capital Corporate Finance Group v. Bankers Trust
40 Company and Others. The judgment was on July 29th.
41
42 MR. RAMPTON: My Lord, the headnote in the actual Times Law
43 Reports, as opposed to the report in the newspaper, says
44 simply this:
45
46 "Parts of documents disclosed on discovery could be
47 blanked out on the ground that they were irrelevant to the
48 issues in the action."
49
50 MR. JUSTICE BELL: If I have the ---
51
52 MR. RAMPTON: That is what we have done.
53
54 MR. JUSTICE BELL: -- the date of the judgment, I can get a
55 verbatim transcript of it, if I wish.
56
57 MR. RAMPTON: My Lord, from there, may I go back to the
58 beginning and take the various matters in the order in
59 which they were dealt with by the Defendants? Those vary
60 as between their response to the Plaintiffs' applications
