Whilst most private hearings can be attended under this scheme, those which are ‘conciliation’ type hearings are not covered by the scheme (though that is not to say that a judge might not agree in an individual case to permit access. Cases marked as FHDRA (First Hearing Dispute Resolution Appointment), IRH (Issues Resolution Hearing), DRA (Dispute Resolution Appointment) or FDR (Financial Dispute Resolution) are ‘conciliation’ type hearings so you are unlikely to be able to attend these hearings under the scheme.

Generally cases with a C number are care (public law children), cases with a P number are private law children, cases with a F number are injunctions (Family Law Act) and D is financial remedy (divorce).

You will need to look at the list to see how long the hearing is listed for and whether it is worth attending (for example you might not want to dip in to day four of seven, but you might identify a one day final hearing that you are able to attend throughout).

Court lists are freely accessible the day before by registering with Courtserve web service.

 

To be ‘duly authorised’ you will need to attend court with : 

• picture identification
• completed FP301 ‘Notice of Attendance of duly authorized lawyer’ form (one for each hearing)
• written confirmation of attendance as a non practising lawyer under cover of an HEI or educational charity 

A lawyer who attends under PD36J cannot have any other connection to the case and must confirm that they are attending for journalistic, public legal education or research purposes. 

You might find it helpful to take our information leaflet with you to hand out to those involved in the cases you want to observe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Transparency Project think it is important that the scheme is monitored. Past experience with other pilots tells us that we should not rely upon government agencies to collect and evaluate this data in a timely way (although on 12 October a revised FP301 was circulated, which adds in an invitation to attendees to send any published blog to the FPR committee for evaluation purposes – this is entirely voluntary. If you want to submit your blog to the committee you should send the link to pfd.office@judiciary.uk).

We have devised a short questionnaire on Survey Monkey (link to the left). We are requesting that any lawyer who attends court under PD36J should complete this survey for each hearing attended – even if the lawyer was refused entry or did not ultimately write any blog post or article as a result of the attendance. This will enable us to build up a picture of what works and what doesn’t work, how much the scheme is being used, what unexpected issues are cropping up, and any regional variation. We have applied for funding to support this work and hope to publish a full evaluation in due course. There is no obligation on you to complete this form, but the more people who complete it the more accurate the picture will be of how the scheme is or is not working. We are also preparing a survey for those involved in a hearing attended by a legal blogger to tell us their experiences (lawyer, parent, judge etc). The link will appear to the left when it is ready.

Please send us links to your blog posts under this scheme as we will be disseminating them as widely as possible as well as gathering as many links in one place as possible. We are happy to host guest posts for lawyers who do not have their own blog, subject to editorial and legal checks. See ‘Will you publish my blog’ below.

The pilot places no restriction on where you publish any article or blog post, nor on the format of it. If you attend court on our behalf we will ask that any blog post is published on the Transparency Project blog before being published elsewhere. The Transparency Project is happy to host blog posts arising from the pilot (subject of course to editorial and legal checks). Lawyers who have written a blog post for publication on The Transparency Project blog should email info@transparencyproject.org.uk. We will need your written confirmation that the contents of the blog post can be published without offending against any legal provision, rule of court, or court order. If the judge has relaxed the automatic restraints upon publication of information in private proceedings you will need to provide confirmation of the terms of this relaxation. Please complete the form we have provided (link to the left).

Even if you don’t fancy attending court and blogging yourself, you can subscribe to our weekly emails, which contain details of all posts published in the preceding week.

You can read blog posts written under the pilot here.

We are often invited by some parties to attend their hearings. Often these requests will be from litigants who are unhappy about their case and how it has been handled, worried about how it might be handled, or who want the issues in their case to be brought to a wider audience. Our approach to these requests is as follows :

Please don’t send us court documents or lots of detail about your case in the hope we will attend court. There are strict rules about what you are allowed to share with us and we don’t want you to be criticised for sharing information that you shouldn’t have. 

Please do send us :

• the case number, time, date, location, length and type of hearing (and whether the hearing is remote or in person)
• no more than a paragraph outlining what the case is about and why you think we should come
• the name of the judge if known (or if not the level of judge dealing with the case e.g. Magistrates (Lay Justices), District Judge (DJ), Circuit Judge (HHJ), Recorder, High Court Judge (J)).
• the contact details for the court

What you need to know:

• Whilst we will not tell the court who has invited us to the hearing (which we treat as a confidential journalistic source), it is likely that in many cases it will be obvious to the court and the other parties who has told us about the case. Whilst we don’t think that anybody should have this held against them in the case this is not something we can advise you about, and you should speak to your own lawyer before contacting us if you are worried.
• Once you contact us we will make an independent decision about whether or not to attend the hearing. Whilst we will take into account any known objection to our attendance (including if someone has invited us but then changed their mind) we might still decide that we would like to attend.
• Whilst it is helpful to be pointed in the direction of hearings that might be interesting and worthwhile for us to attend, we have a limited number of legal bloggers on our team, who often have professional commitments during the day. Our bloggers generally blog on a voluntary (unpaid) basis. It is therefore unlikely that we would have the capacity to attend a specific hearing on request, particularly at short notice.
• We are an educational charity not a campaigning group. If we attended the hearing we might take a different view of your case than you do, and we might want to speak to various people involved with different views than your own. We generally try to report on a neutral basis without taking up a position for or against one or other ‘side’. We are independent of any party or the court. Editorial decisions about the contents of our reports are a matter for us alone and not for either party (or the court) to dictate (as long as we stick to the limits of permission to report, which is usually solely concerned with ensuring the parties / children are not identified).  
• Because of automatic reporting restrictions we might not be able to report anything at all about your case even if we came to court. We generally make a request for permission to report the case anonymously at the end of the hearing. In our experience so far this is often granted and these requests don’t take long to sort out, but in a contentious case things might take longer. 
• Where possible we will email the court/judge in advance of the hearing to indicate our intention to attend. When we do so the court may contact you to ask for your views, or the judge may check the position at the start of the hearing. We find it helpful to be able to see the case outline, skeleton arguments or position statements that have been prepared for the particular hearing we are attending in order to understand a bit more about what we are hearing and to ensure any report we do write is accurate, so we may also ask for permission to see those documents in advance. We are generally not allowed to see them without the judge’s permission, so again, you might be asked for your view about this. Generally if we are provided with these documents it is for information only and we must keep them confidential.
• Where we do attend a hearing we will try and cause as little disruption as possible so you can get on with focusing on the case.
• We do not generally conduct interviews with the parties outside of court as some journalists might.

We’ve written a blog post about this issue, to assist people to understand how they can object and on what grounds the court can exclude a legal blogger or journalist from a hearing.

Read the blog post.