Why court bundles get rejected, and how to avoid it
A rejected bundle is not just an administrative nuisance. The practice directions on court bundles say so in terms. Paragraph 3.1 of the amended Practice Direction 27A provides that failure to comply with any part of it may result in the court removing the case from the list or putting it further back in the list, and may also result in an adverse costs order or a wasted costs order. The Court of Protection’s PD 4B is to the same effect at paragraph 12, adding that a wasted costs order may be made under CPR rule 46.8. In other words, a bundle problem can cost your client their hearing date and cost you money. Almost every rejection I see comes down to one of six avoidable things.
1. It arrived too late
This is the most common and the most painful, because it is entirely within your control. The PD 27A timetable is fixed: bundle contents agreed 7 working days before the hearing, the bundle filed and served 5 working days before, and the preliminary documents lodged by 11am on the day before. That 11am cut-off has teeth: the practice direction says bundles or preliminary documents delivered after it may not be accepted, and then you are into the business of hand-delivering to the judge’s clerk and explaining yourself. Work backwards from the hearing date the moment it is listed, not the night before.
2. The pages are not searchable
E-bundles are now the default, and the court expects to be able to search and copy from them. A bundle assembled from photographs of documents, or from scans that were never put through optical character recognition, is a wall of images: the judge cannot search it, cannot copy a passage into a judgment, and cannot follow a hyperlink into it. Run OCR on any scanned document before it goes in. If you can select and copy the text on screen, the court can too.
3. The numbering is wrong for the proceedings
Family bundles other than financial remedies use section-prefixed numbering in the Bates style, A1, A2, then B1, B2. Financial remedy bundles use consecutive Arabic numbering straight through. Index pages are not numbered at all. Use the wrong scheme, or number the index, and you have a non-compliant bundle before anyone has read a word of it. Just as bad is an index whose page references do not match the pages, which happens the moment a document is added or removed and the index is not regenerated.
4. It is over the page limit without permission
The 350-page limit is not a guideline. Going over it needs the court’s permission, obtained in advance and recorded in the preliminary documents. A bundle that silently runs to 500 pages invites the judge to ask why, and “there was a lot of material” is not an answer that lands well. If the case genuinely needs more, ask first. Within the bundle, individual documents have their own limits too, so a 60-page witness statement or a 90-page expert report is its own problem.
5. It contains documents that should not be there
The bundle is the documents relevant to the hearing, not the whole file. PD 27A now expressly excludes, unless the court directs otherwise, correspondence between legal representatives, social media and text-message exchanges, voice notes and photographs. Padding a bundle with the entire email chain, or a folder of WhatsApp screenshots, is not thoroughness. It irritates the tribunal and buries the documents that matter.
6. The preliminary documents are missing, late or oversized
Position statements now have hard page limits, they must not smuggle in new evidence, and a fresh one is required for each hearing rather than last time’s with an update bolted on. A case summary, a chronology and a reading list that are absent, out of date or over length are all reasons for the court to be unimpressed before you stand up.
The common thread
Look back at that list and notice what it is not. Not one of those six is a point of legal skill or advocacy. Every one is mechanical, and every one is checkable before the bundle leaves your desk: the searchable text, the numbering scheme, the page count, the document types, the deadlines. That is exactly why I built automated checks into Court Bundle Builder, the free bundle tool I maintain. Tell it the type of proceedings and the hearing date, and it applies the right numbering convention, warns you before you pass 350 pages, calculates your lodging deadlines, and flags document types the practice direction excludes. It runs in your browser, it is free, and your papers never leave your device.
None of this is a substitute for reading the practice direction and any directions the court has given in your case. But a bundle that clears these six hurdles is a bundle that gets read on its merits, which is all any of us wants on the morning of a hearing.
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