JERSEY Law and Practice Contributed by: Marcus Pallot, Eleanor Davies and Christopher Tan, Carey Olsen
application is being made to the Royal Court). The applicant must give at least two clear days’ notice of that listing appointment to the other parties in the case of an application to the Mas- ter, and four clear days’ notice in the case of an application to the Royal Court. All parties must attend that listing appointment at which the judicial secretary will fix a date for the hearing of the summons. The applicant must thereafter serve the summons upon all of the other parties at the address given for service, or at their last known address if they have not given an address for service. The summons must be served at least four clear days before the date fixed for the hearing. In advance of the hearing, it is open to a party to apply to the court in writing to allow the notice period for fixing a listing appointment and/or serving a summons to be shortened. Reasons must be given in respect of that request, and a copy of the request must be copied to the other parties, who may raise objections to the request. The court has discretion as to whether or not it will allow any time periods to be shortened. Discovery in Jersey is provided by each party to the litigation, exchanging lists of all relevant documents in its possession, custody or control, and verifying by sworn affidavit that the list is complete. The parties have the right to inspect a document listed in another party’s discovery list, unless the document in question is privileged. The court may order discovery either with the agreement of both parties, upon the request of one party or of its own volition. 5. Discovery 5.1 Discovery and Civil Cases
Discovery is conducted by the parties them- selves and their legal advisers. Discovery must be undertaken in accordance with the RCR and Practice Directions RC 17/07 and RC 17/08. When discovery is ordered, each party to the litigation has a positive duty to search for and disclose all documents that are relevant to any of the issues arising in the court action, irrespective of whether those documents are helpful or harm- ful to that party’s position in the court action. These documents include those in the parties’ possession, those formerly in their possession and those held by third parties (which parties have a right to possess, copy or control). Discov- ery obligations are ongoing and if relevant docu- ments subsequently come to light after the list of documents has been exchanged, they should be disclosed to the other parties. The expression “document” in the context of discovery in Jersey is given an extremely broad interpretation. It extends to both hard copy and electronic documents, and has been held to include emails, video and audio tapes, What- sApp messages and other social media com- munications. In order to limit the scope of discovery, it is com- mon (and the court expects) that the parties to an action will agree on particular “search parame- ters”. In line with other common law jurisdictions where document-heavy commercial disputes are litigated, the use of technology-assisted review is encouraged (where appropriate) so as to save time and costs. Following the filing and exchange of each party’s respective lists, each party must then allow the other parties to inspect and take copies of the documents, except in so far as those documents are privileged.
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