Small is beautiful

Tribunals occasionally direct that the hearing bundle is to be limited to a fixed number of pages.

This is on the whole a good idea. Most bundles contain a lot of documents that don’t need to be there and won’t be referred to during the hearing: see Sedley’s laws of documents. The parties put them in ‘for completeness,’ or because putting them in ‘just in case’ saves making a decision about whether or not they will be needed.

If the tribunal directs that the bundle is to be limited to, say, 300 or 500 pages, the two sides will actually have to think about what they want the tribunal to see. Does the whole of the Employee Handbook really need to go in? Is there any dispute about whether the grievance procedure was properly followed – if not, what’s the grievance procedure doing in the bundle? Does that long email string about when the disciplinary hearing is to take place actually matter?

In the end, a document only needs to be in the bundle if the tribunal needs to read it in order to understand the story properly, or if one side or the other wants to use it in cross-examination. If it doesn’t tick either of those boxes, it’s a waste of paper.