How to win litigation, how to win it quickly- and how to avoid it altogether – Part 2

Introduction

In Part 1 of our series, we showed you the steps you could take that’d help you win any court trial that your business had to go through.

In this Part 2 we show how, if you do those things, you might never get to trial.

Ending the case early

When a dispute “goes legal”, you don’t get to a trial overnight. There are numerous stages to a court case, hence the long time and the high legal costs that are involved.

A key part of the journey between the start of a case and the trial at the end can be called the “exchange of evidence” stage. The court lays down a timetable which demands that each side exchanges with the other side all the evidence that they are going to rely on.

What this means when it comes to the “exchange of documentary evidence” stage is that if you have none of the contracts, emails, diaries, or notebooks that we mentioned in Part 1, you’ll have no hard evidence to rely on – and the other side will quickly come to know that.

What this means when it comes to your preparing your witness statement (which also has to be exchanged with the other side) is that if you have none of the contracts, emails, diaries, or notebooks we mentioned in Part 1, your oral evidence is going to be vague and lacking in any detail. Again, the other side will quickly see that.

If however you do have all of the documents and records, it means the documents you disclose to the other side and the witness statement that you exchange with them will not only show that you have really good detail, but also that you have evidence in support of it, and also that – come the trial – you’re going to come across as a very organised, strong, and reliable witness.

An early escape?

At various stages along the way to trial, each party gets together with their lawyer to review progress in the case and to review likely prospects of success at trial. This usually happens once you receive the other side’s documents and the other side’s witness statements.

If the evidence you sent to the other side is not strong, there is unlikely to be a change in their hitherto aggressive and confident position.

If however they have been presented with evidence that is clear and detailed, their lawyer may have to advise them that their prospects of success are now not what they were and that they had better start settlement negotiations to bring the case to an early end.

As you can see, over and above helping you win at trial, these measures can shorten the case and make sure that you never even get to a trial!

But it gets better still…

As we’ll show in Part 3, if you take our guidance and you record and generate detail and communications in the right way, you might not even get to legal proceedings, let alone a trial.

And you might be able to avail yourself of the “nuclear” options that are open to people and business who are owed money in clear cut situations where there can be no dispute.

We hope this guidance and information is of practical value to you. At Attwaters, we like to keep things simple, and we like to help clients to reduce their legal spend, not increase it.

If you want to talk through any general aspects of this, please call us.  And please do the same if you have any internal or external business dispute that you want to discuss.