I will never, for as long as I live, understand the need for legal papers to be so drawn out and long - other than the people writing them being able to charge per word/page. If people in the legal world made an effort to be even a tiny bit concise, that world would move a lot faster.
If there is 6000 pages it will be the bundle not the arguments as someone else has said. From my experience judges/arbitrators don't see a big bundle as strength, they see it as a party not being arsed to properly condense their evidence and get pissed off.
It gives me hope that they think they need that much. It’s not a sign of confidence is it? I’d be much more worried if they turned up with a few pages as they knew they’d got something concrete.
On a very quick scan, it looks like their panels are comprised of e.g. retired judges, QC's and Professors of Law. I was taught that evidence is only admissible if it is relevant, and in order to be relevant it must be logically probative of a fact in issue. That said, this panel won't have the pressure of time that courts of law have (especially at the moment) and it's my impression that there is more patience with the length of submissions in civil proceedings than in criminal?
500 sheets to a ream of A4 paper, so if they take it all in to the room it'll be a stack the height of 12 reams. Luckily Wigan have plenty of staff to assist with all this paperwork.
On a slight tangent, I went to see Mark Thomas a few years back when he was doing The People's Manifesto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People's_Manifesto) where he got members of the audience to propose policies which would then be voted on and compiled into a manifesto. For example: - "Margaret Thatcher should pay for her own funeral." - "The introduction of a maximum wage." - "Introduce a USA-style 1st Amendment, to protect free speech." - "Party political manifestos should be legally binding." - "Anyone in favour of banning immigration should sign a register and they will be banned from travelling abroad." - "On the voting card there should be a box that says 'None of the above.'" - "That Windsor be renamed Lower Slough." - "We should build 100,000 council houses a year." - "The Daily Mail should have to declare on the masthead 'The newspaper that supported Hitler!'" - "There should be a public referendum before going to war." Anyway, one of my favourites was from a lawyer who suggested that much time and money could be saved by reducing the statute book to just 2 offences: 1) Being out of order 2) Being bang out of order
That would make it nearly 5 times longer than War and Peace. In fact by the time you'd read 6000 pages we could have been in a war, followed by peace.
They have to be written that way to maximise the chance of it being water tight and not having someone get off on a loophole. I'm sure this 6000 pages thing will be nonsense though.
