The UK Judiciary recently introduced new guidance on the preparation of electronic bundles for court hearings. Up until the pandemic e-bundles had been utilised. However, during 2020 and beyond e-bundles were used extensively as court hearings were held remotely with documents becoming bigger and more demanding. This updated guidance which replaces the previous revision published in May 2020 has been developed to ensure consistency in the creation of e-bundles for the efficient preparation and management of court hearings.
What does this mean for your firm? The good news is that at Bundledocs we are fully compliant. Here we have laid out some of the main points within the updated guidance and how you can approach creating your e-bundles compliantly:
Ebundle Creation
All bundles must now be provided in PDF format – something that our solution does automatically. Within your e-bundle all pages must be digitally numbered by computer-generated numbering, not by hand. Regardless of whether the first page is part of an index, the first page of the bundle must be numbered as one with additional pages following sequentially. If you are required to produce a hard copy of your bundle – the pagination must match the e-bundle.
With Bundledocs you can manipulate your documents to meet requirements set out by the UK judiciary. If any of the pages in the bundle have been created in landscape orientation, they must appear within the bundle in this format so that they can be read from left to right. Additionally, you have the option to change the default page view to be 100% to meet guidance set out by the judiciary.
When it comes to the presentation of your ebundle the resolution should not be greater that 300 dpi to prevent slow scrolling or rendering when your ebundle is being viewed. To avoid excessively large bundles, you can easily adjust the resolution for your ebundle.
Formatting
All entries in an index must now be hyperlinked to the corresponding document, all sections must be bookmarked for ease of navigation and the bookmark should contain the page number of the document. With Bundledocs you can automatically generate a customised index and bookmarks, which update each time you generate your bundle. Additionally, all pages with typed text must be subject to OCR, this allows for easier searching for text, highlighting parts of a page, and copying text from the bundle. Our built in OCR functionality means your firm will not have to purchase additional OCR software.
Pre-Hearing
E-bundles can be shared with the courts prior to hearings via email or by uploading to a document upload centre – the issue here is that some bundles may be too large to be sent via email. Bundledocs features a secure share functionality where you can share direct to a third party or via outlook. There is also the option to share as an email attachment or via the third parties software. Additionally, you can download you e-bundle and upload directly depending on the requirements set out by the court.
If new documents need to be added after an e-bundle has been submitted to the judge the judiciary requires that pages are added to the end of a bundle and paginated accordingly. The judge should then be provided with the new bundle and separately the completed revised bundle. Our solution allows you to add additional documents at the last minute while generating a new version with numbering etc. automatically updated. There is also the option to generate your bundle with just the late inserts – rather than the entire bundle which can then be shared.
We want to help you create e-bundles with complete ease. Get in touch to grab a copy of our court compliant template today.