adjourned part-heard

Your case is ‘adjourned part-heard’ if the tribunal doesn’t have time to finish hearing it in the time originally allotted. The same tribunal will rarely if ever be available to continue the case immediately, so this probably means that the hearing won’t restart for several weeks at least, and quite often for some months.

It is inconvenient and annoying for everyone when this happens. The story is interrupted: the tribunal members will have heard other cases meanwhile and forgotten a lot of the evidence that they have heard so far. Impressions – good and bad – that witnesses have made will have faded. The advocates’ knowledge of the documents and the evidence will be stale, and their own scribbled notes will have become inscrutable. Everyone will have to spend time, when the case comes back, re-familiarising themselves with the story so far.

If this happens to you, one thing you can do to make your task at that point less daunting is to write yourself some re-reading notes while the case is still fresh in your mind:

• If you have a notebook full of manuscript notes of the evidence so far, re-read them now – while your ability to read your own handwriting is still assisted by your recollections – and highlight any bits you think are important.
• Type out the most important bits. (If at this point you add anything from memory, make sure your typed note distinguishes between what you have simply copied from your manuscript note, and what you have added from memory.)
• Make a note of where you have got to in the evidence – which witnesses have given evidence so far, and who is yet to come.
• Sort out your papers. The papers for a case tend to get into a muddle while you are going through the hearing so spend a little bit of time making sure now that your papers are complete, your version of the bundle is the same as the version the other party is using, you have complete copies of the final versions of all the witness statements.
• Write yourself a ‘to do’ list for the resumed hearing. At any point in a long hearing you are bound to have a mental ‘to do’ list. You won’t remember it 4 or 5 months later, so write it down.
• If there’s anything on your to-do list that can sensibly be done straight away, do it straight away: for example, if in the course of the evidence it has become clear that there are additional documents held by the other side that they should have disclosed, deal with that at once – don’t wait until a week or so before the resumed hearing and then try to do it in a hurry.