Finding Documents

Collecting the relevant documents you already have

When you ask me to give you legal advice, or to draft a pre-action letter or a statement of case in a case in a court or other tribunal, or an application to the Land Registry, you will need to email to me copies of relevant documents which you have. The documents you have may be on paper, or they may be JPG photos or MP4 video files, or PDFs and spreadsheets, on your computer, tablet or mobile phone, or emails "in the cloud". Whatever the form of the documents, and wherever they are located, you need to preserve the originals, and make copies.

Photos old and new

In a case concerning land photos may be useful. You can take new photos and send them to me. If the state of land in the past is relevant you may have some old photos which you can send as well.

Obtaining further documents 

If you do not happen to have photos of all the time periods in the past which are relevant you might want to see whether you can obtain additional old photos from public sources but, if you do, make sure that you keep track of where the old photos have come from so that you can distinguish between old photos you have had for some time and old photos that have only recently come to light, as what you reasonably believed and were aware of, or should have been aware of, at various times in the past, can be important in some cases. You can obtain historical satellite, aerial or ground-level photographs which were taken in the past by a variety of organisations. Many satellite photos are available free using Google Earth Pro. A well known source of street level photographs is Google Street View. Another potential source of historical photos is records of planning applications because the documents supporting past applications for planning permission are available to download and often include photographs taken by professional surveyors showing what a property was like at the time. Sometimes there might also be photos of other properties in the surrounding area accompanying a planning application. In addition to public sources of images, the current or previous occupants of land, or neighbours and relatives who may have stayed, may have historical photographs.

Other documents

You might also want to obtain other documents from public sources or perhaps from other people but in most cases when seeking initial legal advice you will probably want to do that based mostly on documents you already have. But consider whether there there is also anything else in particular which needs to be obtained straight away - for example you might want to take copies of webpages before they change. 

If you do try to obtain extra documents by asking other people or organisations, public or private, if they can provide copies of documents they may have, make sure that you keep track of where documents have come from because in some cases what documents you had sight of, at various times in the past, and what documents you have only recently seen, can be important.            

If in the past you have engaged solicitors, they may have documents. Letters and emails sent by you to your former solicitors, or received by you from your former solicitors, might possibly be relevant in some cases but they will usually be privileged documents (unless, unusually, the other side was copied in, or unless they are about the details of a transaction which the solicitor is carrying out for you are do not contain any legal advice ) which need to be kept separate from other (non-privileged) documents. Sometimes it is necessary to refer to privileged documents but more often it is the correspondence between your solicitor and the other side (which is not privileged) which, if anything, needs to be referred to. Your former solicitors may have sent you drafts of letters for your comments but it is copies of the letters as actually sent out by your solicitor to the other side which, if any, are likely to be most relevant.

Disclaimer

This information page is designed to be used only by clients of John Antell who have entered into an agreement for the provision of legal services. The information in it is necessarily of a general nature and will not be applicable to every case: it is intended to be used only in conjunction with more specific advice to the individual client about the individual case. This information page should not be used by, or relied on, by anyone else.

This page was lasted updated in August 2024.   Disclaimer