Non-party access to court documents
The applicant was a non-profit unincorporated association representing asbestos victim support groups and it sought access to various documents produced in a case between a parent company and an employee of its subsidiary who contracted asbestosis.
CPR r5.4C provides that non-parties can obtain statements of case (which includes the pleadings but not documents filed with them) but the court's permission is required to obtain "from the records of the court a copy of any other document filed by a party..." At first instance, as reported in our last Newsletter, it was held that the applicant was entitled, subject to the court's permission, to all documents filed at court, including trial bundles and skeleton arguments. The Court of Appeal has now allowed an appeal from that decision.
It held that the "records of the court" are documents kept by the court office as a record of the proceedings, principally "communications between the court and a party or other person", for example the list of documents as opposed to the disclosed documents themselves, or the receipt document for the trial bundles rather than the trial bundles themselves. The following documents are also not "records of the court" (and so cannot be obtained by non-parties under CPR r5.4C): the witness statements, the expert reports, the skeleton arguments, opening or closing submissions, and trial transcripts.
However, the court has an inherent jurisdiction to allow non-parties to obtain copies of skeleton arguments/written submissions used in lieu of oral submissions (see GIO v Liverpool & London Steamship P&I [1999]) as well as the statements of witnesses (including experts) whose evidence stands as evidence in chief and would have been available for inspection during the course of the trial (see CPR r32.13). That said, there is no inherent jurisdiction to allow non-parties to obtain access to trial bundles and trial documents even if they have been referred to in skeleton arguments, witness statements, expert reports, or in open court.
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