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

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