Day 146 - 03 Jul 95 - Page 40
1 secondly, whether I should continue to have the benefit of
2 the transcript which I receive each morning or the day
3 before if you do not. I would not jump to a hasty
4 conclusion about that because, if you look at it from the
5 point of view of your own interest, it does not necessarily
6 follow that if you do not have it I should not, because if
7 I am going to have the benefit, for instance, of looking at
8 transcripts of an accurate, i.e. transcript note of the
9 evidence, the advantage is I will get it right. If I take
10 extracts from it or look back over it to remind myself what
11 people would say, I will remind myself accurately of what a
12 witness of yours has said and I will remind myself
13 accurately of what answer has been given which you might
14 want to pray in aid in due course, just as I will remind
15 myself accurately of evidence which has been given against
16 what you would like to argue for. It runs both ways.
17
18 So, there are various ramifications for you to think about,
19 quite apart from the whole question of whether I have any
20 power to make -- Mr. Rampton says I do not and at the
21 moment it seems to me he is right -- but if you think I
22 have a power to make any direction in relation to
23 transcripts or CaseView, then you will have to give me
24 chapter or verse about it.
25
26 What I am totally disinclined to do at the moment is start
27 advising a party which has the where-with-all to produce a
28 transcript or use CaseView what it should do with it or not
29 do with it.
30
31 MS. STEEL: Some of those things may be we should deal with
32 tomorrow, but there are a few things that I wanted to say
33 tonight, and I think we would ask the Plaintiffs to
34 reconsider this matter. Firstly, we have not given
35 transcripts to anyone other than witnesses for their
36 comments and legal advisers for the purposes of advice.
37
38 On the last occasion this was brought up Mr. Rampton
39 produced a Canadian magazine, a photocopy of a Canadian
40 magazine, which said something about transcripts are
41 available from such and such address. We have absolutely
42 no idea why they printed that. We have never said that
43 transcripts are available. Apart from anything else, it
44 would be completely impractical for us to even consider
45 photocopying, I do not know how many thousands pages of
46 documents, for distribution to the general public.
47
48 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I am going to adjourn now. One thing I think
49 you have to think about is if I adhere to the provisional
50 view I have taken, that Mr. Rampton is right that I have no
51 power to make orders in relation to how the parties spend
52 their money in this matter, and if my provisional judgment
53 that I do not want anything to do with giving indications
54 one way or another to a party in this case as to what it
55 should do or should not do in a matter like that, then you
56 have to -- it might be helpful -- I will rephrase that --
57 you do not have to do anything at all, it might be helpful
58 for you to consider what your attitude is to keeping any
59 copies of transcripts which you get in the future to
60 yourselves because, if it be the case (and this is not a
