Preparing For A Trial: Litigation Insight From RPC Trainee

Aug 05, 2015

Written By Billy Sexton, Editor, AllAboutLaw.co.uk

Rebecca Rose is a trainee solicitor at RPC. Here she details one of her experiences in litigation, the experience of which “has been by far the most formative of my legal training so far”. Read on for an absolutely fascinating insight into how trainees help prepare for a trial.

A trial is the law in action. It is the school play in which you wonder if you will ever get a part. In the same way that your school play has little in common with your mid-November maths lesson, neither does being involved in a trial have much in common with the day-to-day work of a trainee solicitor, but I was lucky enough to be involved in a trial during the first seat of my training contract. That experience has been by far the most formative of my legal training so far.

I assisted on a case acting for the Defendant to an insurance coverage dispute over a catastrophic warehouse fire. I joined the department while witness evidence was being prepared and saw it right through to its trial in the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court, which took place during my final week. It would be fair to say that in spite of completing both the Civil Litigation and Advanced Commercial Litigation modules of the Legal Practice Course, a lot of the work involved on this matter took me by surprise.

Junior lawyers often expect that the tight timetables and potential sanctions created by the Civil Procedure Rules and the Jackson Reforms will have extinguished that Bleak House style of litigation where cases go on for so long that no one can remember what they were about. Of course, a lot has changed and both claimants and defendants have high standards to meet. However, it does not take long for weeks to become months and months to become years as settlement opportunities are narrowly missed and the substance of a claim changes as new evidence comes to light. The catastrophic fire that triggered this claim occurred in 2007, and we had a real challenge finding witnesses who remembered the exact detail of what happened. In the end, I played an elaborate game of picture-pairs with Google and the telephone directory and found a former employee from the warehouse who had been working during the night of the fire. My senior associate and I then had a memorable trip to see him and take his statement. These are the sorts of experiences you don't expect: I thought that preparing witness statements would be a dry legalistic matter, but in fact it is one of the liveliest parts of litigation. You cannot control what someone will say, and the act of putting someone's experiences into words and learning about what they think has become one of my favourite parts of the job.

In the end, preparing for trial felt remarkably similar to preparing for that school play. The week before the curtain went up we met with our assorted cast at Counsel's Chambers daily. We went through the evidence that we would present in minute detail in order to flush out any possible issues or inconsistencies. We helped our witnesses and experts prepare for cross-examination and explained what it might be like once they were in the court. We also did a lot of number crunching in order to report back to the client on what the possible outcomes of the trial might mean financially. The money is never more important than it is once you have incurred all the costs of taking the case to trial and you know you only have a few days to prove your case to the judge.

But once you are in court, the big picture becomes the background to whatever minute detail is being discussed right at that moment. Whilst the solicitors are one step removed from the eye of the storm – the barrister has the leading role in the court – it is still an environment of immediate pressure for everyone involved. As a trainee, I became a sort of chaperone for our witnesses and experts. I made sure they were comfortable and confident (you cannot underestimate how intimidating a court can be); I passed messages back and forth between them and our barrister as they reacted to what was being said; and I helped debrief them at the end of each day. Taking on this kind of role has little to do with legal training; it's more about instinct and common sense, but it was by the far the part of my job I enjoyed the most. It was where I got to learn which parts of the law matter to people and which parts of the law seem outdated. I would encourage anyone to put their hand up to help with those trial bundles and cross-reference those experts' reports: the hard work of preparing for trial is nothing in comparison to the incredible learning curve you will experience once you're there.

By the way, we won.

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