Litigants want to know if they’ve won. Judgments should tell them

Who is a judgment written for? Former Court of Appeal judge Sir Robin Jacob recounts the story of a Supreme Court member from Canada, infamous for using more than 100 citations in his judgments, who explained that rulings were so long because they had to serve the parties, the legal profession and the academics.

This reasoning – not supported by Jacob – came to mind this week when a litigant in person responded to her court victory over High Street fashion giant Zara.

Amber Kotrri, who runs a business called House of Zana in Darlington (pictured above), was taken to a tribunal by Zara saying her trademark application should be refused because it was too similar in name and could confuse customers.

Kotrri won the case, said that she could not open the tribunal’s decision for several days but when she did, she ‘couldn’t really understand a lot of it as I had butterflies’. Eventually she skipped most of the 29 pages and saw in the conclusion that Zara’s opposition had been unsuccessful.

But in an age of speed reading and increasingly unrepresented parties, is it not time for new rules to ensure LiPs can understand the rulings that affect them? Start every judgment with a precis of the case and the decision, as well as any award resulting from it. This should be the norm for most cases and surely mandatory for those where one party has no lawyer available to explain it.

If people cannot understand the ruling that affects them then justice is not being served properly.

This is not to criticise the judges. There have been great strides in the last 10 years in making rulings easier to read and in particular rulings tailored for young people affected by the decisions. As Lord Burrows pointed out in his excellent speech of May last year, if we are serious about improving the quality and conciseness of judgments, it needs to be impressed on the powers that be that judges need far more time to think about, write and edit their judgments.

But despite the irony of judges making repeated requests for slimmer skeletons, judgments are often still too long, too opaque and too self-indulgent. As Lord Bingham wrote in The Rule of Law, the length, elaboration and prolixity of some common law judgments ‘can in themselves have the effect of making the law to some extent inaccessible’.

The Supreme Court and Court of Appeal already make efforts to provide a summary of cases and help people (not least legal journalists) understand what has been decided. But the time might have come to think more radically at how all judgments are set out and structured, front-loading each ruling with a summary of the outcome and making it clear from the outset what the decision is. There is time and space for reasoning later, but people really just want to know if they have won or lost, and they shouldn’t need to wade through dozens of pages to find out.

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