Practice notice

Electronic bundles for Applications for Permission to Appeal

16 March 2020

The Justices wish to introduce a scheme for dealing with applications for permission to appeal electronically.

The plan is to introduce this as a parallel facility, rather than in substitution for paper, from 1st May.

Lord Reed, as President of the Supreme Court and Chairman of the Judicial Committee, issues this Practice Note to take effect from 1st May 2020. It applies to additional documents filed in support of applications for permission to appeal, and to notices of objection, respondent's submissions and objections to such applications, which are filed on or after that date.

1. Rule 7 of the Supreme Court Rules and Rule 7 of the Judicial Committee (Appellate Jurisdiction) Rules require that documents filed in hard copy must also be provided by electronic means but this requirement has not been rigidly enforced for permission applications etc. Electronic bundles are, of course, required for appeal hearings.

2. As the members of the Court and of the Board wish to extend their use of electronic material, from 1st May, all material filed in support of, or in opposition to, permission applications must also be provided in electronic form.

This means that, in addition to the hard copies which are filed,

  • additional documents filed by an appellant in support of a permission application (with the application itself) must be emailed to the Registry as a single indexed and bookmarked pdf;
  • notices of objection or submissions or objections filed by a respondent in response to a permission application must be emailed to the registries.

All documents, notices etc which are over 10 Mb must be provided on a memory stick as a single indexed pdf. The requirements of PD 14 and of PD 9 for electronic hearing bundles do not need to be complied with but there must be bookmarks for each separate document within the single pdf. The registry staff will then create a folder containing all these documents for each application. Material filed by interveners who support a permission application is usually sent by email and will be added to the folder.

3. Practitioners and litigants in person (party litigants) who are unable to comply with this practice should contact the Registry.

4. It is hoped that in time it will be possible significantly to reduce the number of hard copies of documents which are currently required.

Lord Reed of Allermuir