CL-2022-000699 - [2025] EWHC 1948 (Comm)

Fecha: 28-Jul-2025

The DGH

The DGH

In the context of what is on any view, substantial and complex multi-party litigation, the DGH was inevitably significantly more onerous than the type of guidance hearing ordinarily envisaged by paragraph 11.

In line with the estimate in the Application Notice, the hearing was listed for 2.5 hours and in fact took slightly longer.

ii)

Both parties appeared by counsel; the Claimants by both leading and junior counsel and the Second Defendant by junior counsel.

iii)

There was a substantial hearing bundle running to some 900 pages and this was accompanied by the case management bundle with a witness statement from Mr. Yardley on behalf of the Claimants answering the Second Defendant’s criticism of the Claimants’ approach to disclosure and preparation for the first CMC. The hearing bundle included approximately 261 pages of correspondence.

iv)

There were significant skeleton arguments from both parties; the skeleton argument of the Claimants running to some 16 pages and (with the permission of the Court) the skeleton argument of the Second Defendant running to some 39 pages (including 11 pages of Appendix).

As set out in the Note, I gave guidance on each of the issues raised by the parties to the effect that:

With limited exception, the Claimants were not required to apply the additional search terms sought by the Second Defendant to either the Gemini Custodians or the VCUK Custodians.

ii)

The full set of search terms in Schedule 1 to the Note were to be applied to one further e-mail address.

iii)

The parties were to cooperate to agree the terms of a Model C disclosure request concerning the Claimants’ claim to recover their costs of funding Deloitte’s investigations.

iv)

The Claimants were to provide a complete list of all devices, data repositories and categories of documents collected and processed by Deloitte as well as an explanation as to the scope of the VCUK documents the Claimants were proposing to search.

As the Claimants submitted in support of this application, the majority of the hearing before me was concerned with the question of whether the Claimants were required to apply additional search terms to the two sets of custodians identified above.