Navigating the bundle
Solicitors who compile hearing bundles sometimes put in a tabbed divider card for every single document. That’s a pain: it adds a lot of bulk to the bundle and obscures the post-it notes you want to add to mark the most important documents.
But it’s true that it can be helpful to be able to flick quickly to the next document. The other week, dealing with a fat bundle, I got bored of repeatedly turning through the pages of a management statement of case – complete with multiple appendices – in order to get to the next document in the chronological sequence. So I used a heavy-duty hole punch to make a notch in the top right hand corner off all the pages of the statement of case and its appendices. That made it easy to skip to the end of the statement of case.
Not rocket science – just a little thing that can make life slightly easier in a paper-heavy case.
I must say that I share your frustration with solicitors insistence on using tabs! I usually remove them all together and go by page number alone. I tend to use folding bulldog clips to keep a large document in ‘one lump’ within the bundle.
I would also highly recommend moving to an electronic bundle. I now scan all bundles that I receive and have copies on my MacBook and on an iPad. You can also electronically mark particular points that you want to go to in the bundle, annotate and add highlighting. When someone mentions the page number in the tribunal I am on that page within two or three seconds while everyone else is swinging their way through lever arch files.
You can also have annotated and highlighted witness statements electronically and you can add your own notes during the hearing.
It isn’t something I would recommend anyone doing unless and until you are comfortable with it and I must confess I do always have a hard copy of everything with me as well but I am now at the stage where I very rarely need to resort to it. I also have a hard copy notebook with me which I probably do still resort to quite a bit.