A High Court judge has criticised the conduct of a hearing in which advocates spoke so quickly in court that the transcriber could no longer continue.

In a postscript to his ruling in Libyan Investment Authority v Credit Suisse International & Ors, His Honour Judge Pelling QC said the speed and brevity of the oral advocacy had been unacceptable and could lead to costs sanctions.

Applications for summary judgment or to strike out the claims had been listed for a time that was ‘manifestly too short’ given the number of parties involved, the number of issues raise and the volume of evidential material and authorities relied on, the judge said.

A total of 15 counsel were involved, including seven QCs, for a hearing that lasted just six days. The judge said this meant that oral submissions were shortened to force them into the available time, with submissions on the last day in particular ‘spoken at a speed that made them almost incomprehensible’.

The transcriber complained twice before saying she was unable to continue, resulting in a mid-day adjournment and the parties thereafter making references to their bundle and relying on the judge to unbundle points after the hearing was complete.

HHJ Pelling added: ‘None of this is remotely acceptable. Oral advocacy remains the mainstay of the way civil litigation in England and Wales is conducted and it is not acceptable oral advocacy to reduce submissions to little more than a series of references that a judge can then be left to find across a vast bundle (assuming that all the references given are accurate) in an attempt to provide a coherent judgment within an acceptable time.’

The judge’s task was made harder by the parties preparing the case ‘without restraint or constraint or any attempt at achieving proportionality’. The bundle ‘master index’ ran to 44 pages, with the hearing bundle consisting of 36 separate bundles of evidence and attachments to witness statements ‘running to many thousands of pages’.

He added: ‘This is material that would have justified a trial measured in weeks rather than days, not an application hearing listed as it was. I will consider on hand down whether to impose a cost sanction in respect of this conduct.’

In the underlying case, the judge ruled that the claimant’s claims were statute barred and had no realistic prospect of succeeding, so the defendants’ applications were successful.