One of our members in Northern Ireland had a case listed on Monday.
It involved BLM Law who, like the other big defendant brands, have recently set-up in Northern Ireland to roll out their way of doing litigation. They were instructed by AXA on behalf of the defendant.
At 4.10pm on Friday they served 200 pages of BHR evidence.
In response, Counsel made an application on Monday for the Judge to either disallow their evidence or to adjourn to allow the claimant proper time to consider the same. Here is the payoff:
“Judge Devlin said that this type of activity by the Defence practitioners is a blight on the court service, it was crass behaviour by them, the matter had been listed since November, that if they had bothered their backsides to look at the case in a proper fashion and establish what their actual Defence was then there was no reason why their evidence could not have been served long before now.
This is the exact reason why there is a bottleneck at the moment in cases being dealt with, they are only allowed to list 4 a day and he will not stand for this approach by parties in his court.”
Ouch!
Judge Devlin adjourned and awarded costs thrown away against the Defendant. Makes you a bit envious doesn’t it?