Judges also despair of solicitors?

www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=ed25489
"8. It is convenient to refer at this point to part of a judgment which I delivered on 16 August 2007 in private and which has not hitherto entered the public domain:

“Consistently with the Practice Direction, the father being a litigant in person, Her Honour Judge Bevington on 30 May 2007 had directed that the mother’s solicitors were to prepare and lodge a consolidated and paginated bundle in accordance with the President’s Practice Direction of 27 July 2006: see [2006] 2 FLR 199. The bundle as prepared by them was lamentably deficient. There was no reading list. The chronology was virtually useless – it omitted many relevant events and was not cross-referenced to the bundle. The mother’s skeleton argument was missing from the bundle. Most of the key documents, having originally been exhibited to various affidavits, were scattered through the bundle in neither chronological nor thematic order. The index to the bundle was virtually useless, as it did not condescend to list the various documents contained in the various exhibits. The consequence was that any kind of sustained pre-reading of the bundle, and in particular of the key documents, was virtually impossible.

There was no excuse for any of this. The explanations given in answer to my questions and criticisms were wholly unsatisfactory. Difficulties with public funding provided no excuse: they had been overcome, I was told, on 13 July 2007.

The solicitors responsible for this deplorable state of affairs ought to know better. They are experienced family solicitors whose notepaper is festooned with the logos of virtually every relevant family law professional body or association. It is now over seven years since the Practice Direction in its original form was first promulgated. The Practice Direction in its present form was published a year ago. It is simply not good enough. Endless complaints by the judges of the Division seem to have had strikingly little effect. Enough is enough. In future, those guilty of comparable failings should expect to be publicly identified. Perhaps public naming and shaming will succeed where judicial exhortation has so conspicuously failed.”

9. Nothing that has happened since then suggests that matters have improved. I see no reason to modify or to moderate what I then said."

Maggie,

Thanks for putting that link up!

At long last sloppy solicitors are being brought to task!

It is outrageous that this sort of thing has been allowed to go on for so long. Litigants-in-person try to comply with the procedure in an atmosphere of distrust, if not acrimony and they see the unpunished procedural non-compliance by their xtb's solicitors as more treatment of them as being inconsequential nobodies.

YA