When it comes down to it, litigation is a series of rather formal meetings, interspersed by phone calls and letters.

This means that many of the same rules for running good meetings apply to running cases.

One of these is that there should always be an agenda. Whether you are in the tribunal or on the phone to the respondent, you should know what issues you are going to discuss and what you are trying to achieve.

There is no need to make a meal of this. A few lines scrawled on the back of an envelope saying “Discovery – Disciplinary Code and Minutes of Sep Meeting. Bundles – Next Tues?” may be plenty for a phone call to the Respondent’s representative. Often you won”t need to write anything. The point is to spend a few moments making sure you know what you need to get done.

The more complicated and lengthy the meeting the more detailed the agenda will become. Hearings will often generate many different agendas. For example, you may have a list of things you need to discuss with the Respondent before the hearing, preliminary matters the tribunal will need to deal with, areas you need to cover with each witness and, finally, points to make in your submissions. At this point, most people (definitely including the blog’s authors) will need to write things down to make sure everything is covered.

Once you have an idea of your agenda it is often worth trying to agree at least some of it with the other side. In many hearings this has implicitly been done once the issues in the case have been determined and you have exchanged witness statements. These form the agenda for the hearing. But in preliminary hearings, particularly about case management issues, you will start from scratch. The hearing will be infinitely easier and more productive if you have decided ahead of time what you need to cover. The ideal is to be able to say to the tribunal something like “Sir, the parties have been discussing the necessary case management orders. We’ve been able to agree a time table for discovery, production of bundles and exchange of witness statements. We’ve also been able to agree the list of issues. We’re in dispute about the way the medical evidence should be dealt with…”

Even if you can’t agree anything on the agenda, the hearing will be much easier if you agree exactly what it is that you’re disagreeing about.

The final point to bear in mind is that in litigation you will never have complete control over the agenda. The other side will have their own ideas and the tribunal will be in charge during the hearing. It is all too common for cases to devolve into pitched battles, not about the issues in the case, but about what the issues are. Try to avoid this.

Case management discussions by telephone are increasingly common. Here are a few hints to get the most out of them:

• Be on time. The tribunal will be just as unhappy if you are five minutes late to a telephone call as they would be if you were five minutes late to any other hearing.
• Identify yourself. Unlike in a normal hearing the tribunal cannot deduce who you are by where you’re sitting. At the start of the hearing make sure you have explained who you are. If there is a chance of confusion later on, you should start your remarks by saying something like “Mr Rhodes for the claimant, Madam…”.
• Speak in turn. Interrupting needs to be done carefully in all hearings, but is particularly problematic during a telephone call. If people speak at the same time it quickly becomes difficult to follow who is talking and what they’re saying. Unless it is absolutely necessary, wait for your turn. If it is absolutely necessary, indicate that you need to speak by saying something like “Sir, if I could interrupt for one moment” and wait to be acknowledged.
• Talk to the other side beforehand. Unlike a normal CMD, you will not be able to speak to the respondent before the hearing or even have a whispered conversation during proceedings. Anything that needs to be discussed will need to have been discussed before the call starts.
• Prepare an agenda. Telephone CMDs are a very good way of running briskly through an agreed agenda of points, but a bad way of sorting out what the agenda should be. So have a list of points that need to be dealt with, and try to agree it with the respondent before the hearing. If possible, send that proposed agenda to the tribunal in advance. If this is not possible try to spend some time at the beginning of the call setting it out clearly.
• Make sure everyone has the relevant documents. One seriousness weakness of a telephone hearing is that there is no way of passing documents between the people involved. If the tribunal will need to see a document they must have it in advance. And everyone must be able to refer each other to the document they are talking about. This means an indexed and paginated bundle is vital.