John Bolch, the well-known and respected family law blogger has written a new post for Cansford about judgements - and how a few adjustments could make a world of difference to the vast volume of documents and cases professionals have to read.
Like any lawyer, I have read many judgments over the years, beginning with those required by my university studies, and continuing to this day. Quite how many I have read I cannot say, but it must run into the thousands (although to be honest many have just been quickly scanned).
Judgments are of course important. They are important to the parties, they are important to lawyers, particularly as precedents, and they are important to the public, as explanations for judicial decisions, particularly in this age when we are all seeking greater transparency from our family courts.
It is therefore essential that judgments are clear and approachable, but this has most certainly not always been the case.
Wall of text
When I began reading judgments way back in the 1970s, they were mostly little more than a wall of text. Yes, the text was divided into paragraphs, but that was about it. Finding your way around was extremely difficult.
Of course, back then almost all law reports appeared in dedicated annual printed volumes, such as the All England Law Reports, or the Queen’s Bench Division reports. These volumes did assist a little in identifying specific sections of reports, by reference to the page where that section appeared in the volume, and each page also had letters down the margin, to assist with finding a particular place on a page.
But with the notable exception of headnotes, to which I will refer below, that was about it. For a lawyer, it was difficult to find your way around. For the layperson, it was impossible.
Thankfully, things have since improved somewhat. The following are some of the improvements I have witnessed.
Numbered paragraphs and headings
Judgments now of course appear on the internet, freely available to all. And that of course is a wonderful thing. But they still need to be at least reasonably easy to read and understand.
Incredibly, it has only been in relatively recent times that (almost) all judgments have been published with numbered paragraphs, making it a simple matter to refer to a particular paragraph in the judgment.
Along with numbered paragraphs we now usually get headings and sub-headings, explaining what each part of the judgment is about, and making navigation so much easier.
Headnotes and indexes
As someone who reads a lot of judgments, this is my bête noire.
There is nothing worse than having to read through reams of text just to find out what a judgment is about. A simple summary in a headnote does away with that task.
A headnote can also assist with wading through legal jargon, although the actual language used by judges is of course something that has also improved over the years.
Thankfully, a few trailblazing judges, mostly of the, shall we say, younger generation, do include headnotes in their judgments, for which I am extremely grateful.
And some also include an index of the headings in the judgment, usually hyperlinked to the headings. Very useful.
Similarly, some judgments include footnotes with links to external sources, another excellent innovation.
Tables and images
A further very useful thing that now often appears in judgments is the use of tables, for example to set out a list of assets in a financial remedies case. So much easier and clearer than listing items within text.
And some judgments even include images of evidence placed before the court. A very recent example was in a financial remedies case involving a dispute over share transfers. The judgment included an image of an attendance note referring to the share transfer, bringing the evidence ‘to life’.
Letters to children
A relatively recent innovation in children cases, and a most welcome one, is the inclusion in the judgment of a letter to the children involved, explaining the decision, in language that the children will understand (at least when they are old enough to read).
And because some judges may naturally find it difficult to write to children, in February the President of the Family Division published a toolkit to help them with the task. As he explained, the benefit of judges communicating with the child at the centre of proceedings has long been recognised.
The future?
So we have clearly come a long way in the last fifty years. But is there more that can be done?
I have already mentioned the benefit of headnote summaries. These, I think, should be universal, for the benefit of lawyers and non-lawyers alike.
And I have been particularly impressed by the way that judgments published by the Australasian Legal Information Institute are formatted, including for example lists of statutes and cases cited in the judgments.
AI judgements anyone?
And I’m sure that others far cleverer than I will come up with other useful innovations (AI-written judgments anyone?). Who knows, perhaps in fifty years’ time judgments will be as approachable as the front page story in a tabloid newspaper (although hopefully more newsworthy).
[Oh, and for non-lawyers, the spelling in the title is not a typo. For reasons I have never understood, the record of a judicial decision in a law report is a ‘judgment’ without the ‘e’, as used by our American friends, whereas in any other context we use ‘judgement’ with an ‘e’.]
