Cape Intermediate Holdings V Dring [2018] EWCA Civ 1795

Non-party access to court documents

The applicant was a non-profit unincorporated association representing asbestos victim support groups and it sought access to various documents produced in a case between a parent company and an employee of its subsidiary who contracted asbestosis.

CPR r5.4C provides that non-parties can obtain statements of case (which includes the pleadings but not documents filed with them) but the court's permission is required to obtain "from the records of the court a copy of any other document filed by a party..." At first instance, as reported in our last Newsletter, it was held that the applicant was entitled, subject to the court's permission, to all documents filed at court, including trial bundles and skeleton arguments. The Court of Appeal has now allowed an appeal from that decision.

It held that the "records of the court" are documents kept by the court office as a record of the proceedings, principally "communications between the court and a party or other person", for example the list of documents as opposed to the disclosed documents themselves, or the receipt document for the trial bundles rather than the trial bundles themselves. The following documents are also not "records of the court" (and...