Naming documents for a matter in a civil court or other civil tribunal

General Principles

A key part of most litigation is the Disclosure of Documents stage where each party is normally directed to supply the other party with a copy of every relevant document which it has and a list of the documents. The list will identify each document with a concise description and date. Normally the same concise description for the document will eventually be used, together with the date, as a bookmark name in the eBundle used for the final hearing if the document is included in the eBundle. If a system  such as Bundledocs is used to store documents and generate the disclosure list and later the eBundle then the concise description of the document will be entered in the Document Description field in Bundledocs when the document is first loaded to Bundledocs.  

The Document Description should be a concise description of the document which is sufficient, together with the document date, to enable anyone to quickly identify the document. The concise description should include an indication of the type of document - email, letter, agreement, conveyance, etc. - followed, particularly for common document types, by some further brief identifying information, as in the example below. It should not be more than 90 characters and will normally be much less than that.

The Document Description you assign should be sufficient, together with the date, to enable someone else to easily identify the document. Imagine that someone else has a large number of documents, in paper form, spread out on a huge long table in front of them. Of course most people have more sophisticated methods of managing documents than that (!) but if you think of someone looking along a long table that will help you to think about the general mental process involved in someone looking for a document and verifying that they have found the right document. Our imaginary person looking along the long table should be able, just given a Document Description and Date, to quickly locate the document and be sure that the document they have found is the right one. This means that the key details in the Document Description should be such that it is easy for the person looking along the long table to spot the document. Someone can see, even from a distance, that a document is a photo or a letter or an email or some other document type, so you should always include the document type. Then looking closer at a document it is usually easy to see the date - depending on the document type you know roughly where on the page to look for the date. Then to be sure they have the right document they need some easy-to-spot-and-check detail in the document. For an email the obvious detail to quote would be the time of the email and the names of sender and recipient. So for an email the word Email, the names of sender and recipient and time and date are used for identification. Even if only one email was sent by that sender to that recipient on that day, the time still needs to be included in the Document Date because our imaginary person looking along the long table needs to be able not only to find the email matching the description but also to be sure that what they have found is definitely the right document and they cannot be assumed to know that there was only one email that day.

Generally you should not include in the Document Description a summary of what the document actually says. This is for two reasons

• Imagine the person looking for the document among the documents spread out on the long table. If they have to skim read a document to see if its contents correspond to your summary, that will take them extra time.

• Although every tribunal case is concerned with some kind of dispute between the parties which will be finally decided by a judge, the tribunal process is designed to be civilised and efficient with as little dispute as possible in the practical preparations for the final hearing. At the final hearing itself (and, where appropriate, in statements of case and perhaps witness statements) each party may argue that a particular email should be interpreted, or was interpreted by the recipient, in a particular way or that one part of an email is the most important, but before the hearing the tribunal expects the parties to co-operate in disclosing documents and in the compiling of the eBundle and to avoid unnecessary contention in such practical preparatory matters. If you attempt, in a Document Description, to summarise the content of an email or other document your summary may be (even if you do not intend it to be) contentious. You may characterise an email as making a request but the other side might see it as making a demand or even a threat. Or the other side may feel that you are trying to downplay some aspect of the email by referring to some more prosaic part of it and they may feel that they should refer to it in a way which mentions what they regard as its most significant point. This happens more often than you might expect and at worst it can lead, at the Disclosure of Documents and eBundle preparation stages, to you referring to an email with one name and the other side insisting on using a different name with the potential for mistakes and confusion and time wasted. If, however, you give the email a Document Description containing the word Email and the names of sender and recipient, that non-contentious information, together with the time and date, can easily be used to identify the document without there being any cause for any fruitless pre-hearing wrangling over the name used to identify the document.

There may be some special cases where you need to mention in the Document Description what the document says (or shows, in the case of a photograph) but, if so, you should choose some feature which is easy to check and which is likely to be non-contentious. For example usually a letter would be named like this

and this is normally sufficient as it is not usual for for two letters to be sent by the same sender to the same recipient on the same day (because normally the sender will wait to see if they get a reply in the post in the following days before writing further). However if, unusually, two letters are sent by the same person to the same recipient on the same day the Document Description for each letter will need to contain some detail to distinguish between them. If both letters have a reference number and the reference numbers of the two letters are different then the reference number can be used like this:

but if there is no reference number (or if there is a reference number but both letters have the same reference number) then you may have no choice but to use a two or three word summary of what each letter is about, like this:

If you have to do this make sure that for the two or three word summary you choose something non-contentious which makes it easy to identify which letter is which without any extensive reading. 

Document Descriptions for different kinds of documents

If a document is a letter, the word Letter is the obvious word to describe it and the names of sender and recipient are the obvious further identifying information to use in the Document Description, but for less common document types you may not have come across before it can be less easy to decide what Document Description to use and the guidance below may help.    

Formal Legal Documents

It should be easy to find the document type (Deed, Agreement, Particulars  of Claim, Defence, Grant, etc.) for a formal legal document because it should appear prominently on the first page of the document. Although simply using the document type may be sufficient, in conjunction with the date, to identify the document, it is better to add the names of those who signed the document (or the name of the organisation they were signing on behalf of) as well.

In the case of witness statements (and statutory declarations) you should include the surname of the person who made and signed the statement:

In the case of an official copy of a document provided by the Land Registry, title number should always be included:

Formal Business Documents

Business documents which have a degree of formality about them, such as Purchase Orders and Invoices, will have a reference number which should be included in the Document Description:

Letters and Emails

Traditionally not more than one letter is sent by a given sender to a given recipient on any particular day (because the sender will normally wait for a reply in the post before sending a further letter):

30 Sep 2018 Letter John Smith to Paul Jones 

In the case of emails, however, a time as well as a date is essential as there may be several emails between the same parties in the course of a day.

It is becoming increasingly common for people to compose a communication in traditional letter format, save it as a PDF, and then send it attached to an email saying simply e.g.  "Please see attached letter". Such emails should be named in the usual way but instead of saying just Email it can say Emailed Letter.

Instant Messages

A screenshot copy of a message - or of a series of short related messages - would be named as shown below. If the messages included in the screenshot extend over more than one day the "document date" will be the date of the last message in the screenshot. 

Other Document Types

Where a document does not have its document type actually printed on it you should try to use a concise name which most people would instantly understand, avoiding less well known abbreviations. Here are some examples:

Report 

Bank Credit  

Bank Statement 

Webpage www.brownandsmith.co.uk/home

Statement of Case - Respondent

Notice of Hearing

Order

Judgment

Decision

For land documents the document type will generally be one of the following:

Abstract

Agreement

Application Form                   (form used to make an application to the Land Registry)

List of Documents (a list of documents accompanying an Application Form)

Assent

Assignment

Charge

Conveyance

Deed

Lease

Licence

Plan (where only the plan forming part of a conveyance document is filed at the Land Registry not the whole document)

Statement of Truth

Statutory Declaration

Sub-Charge

Transfer

FAQs

What should I do if there are pages missing from a document?

Where pages of a document are missing, for example a report with page 5 missing, this should be indicated in the Document Description thus: 

Report by Dr Smith (pages missing) 

This is to alert anyone looking at the document that (a) pages are missing and (b) their omission is not due to any paper misfeed when you scanned in the documents: on the contrary you found the pages missing when you came to scan in the paper documents (or when you came to copy electronic documents). 

Sometimes, rather than simply saying “pages missing”, it is possible to be more specific whilst still being concise: 

Conveyance Smith to Jones (plan missing) 

What should I do if the document is illegible?

If a document is partially illegible, this should be indicated thus:

Conveyance Smith to Jones (partially illegible)  

This is to alert anyone looking at the document that the illegibility is not due to inadequate scanning by you (e.g. selecting too low a DPI setting) but because the original document you are scanning is only partially legible, so that they know that there is no point in requesting a better copy from you.

What should I do if a deed or other formal document is unsigned?

In the case of many documents, such as most invoices, it is not to be expected that they would be signed, but where there is a document which has a place set apart for a signature, but has not in fact been signed, this should be indicated thus: 

Deed John Fisher and Peter Fisher (unsigned) 

to draw attention to the fact that the document is an unsigned copy. Often the different parties signing a deed, agreement, etc. are based at some distance from each other and one party will sign the document, take a copy, and then send off the deed, signed at that stage only by them, to the other party for their signature. So having a copy of a deed signed by only one person is not unusual but if there are no signatures at all on a document which has places set apart for signature, that should be indicated.

How should Exhibits be named?

When it gets to the stage of litigation where a statement is being prepared which will refer to a document with an exhibit mark, the exhibit mark should be added to the Document Description as shown in the example below.

30 Sep 2018 JJS3 Letter John Smith to Paul Jones 

If documents are instead referred to by disclosure list number the number in square brackets - e.g. [R37] should be added to the start of the Document Description. Generally this should only be done for those documents actually referred to in a statement by disclosure list number, not routinely for all documents otherwise it becomes difficult to spot a specific disclosure list number in an eBundle index. 

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 April 2024 Disclaimer