The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued new guidelines for filing of written submissions and compilations before the Constitution Benches and in important final hearing cases.
As per the Apex Court, the guidelines would apply to final hearings before the Constitution Benches and other Benches involving large records and multiple Counsels assisting the Court.
It said the guidelines would provide a Standard Operating Procedure for filing soft copies of written submissions and common compilations of documents, rules and precedents. They would further help in fixing timelines for oral arguments.
As per a communique issued by the Supreme Court, the Bench would in advance nominate Nodal Counsels comprising an Advocate-on-Record/Advocate each representing the side of the appellants and the respondents.
The Nodal Counsels would coordinate with all the lawyers appearing in the case and compile & file in the electronic form five volumes.
The first volume would comprise written submissions of petitioners/appellants, while the second would contain written submissions of the respondents. The third volume would consist of documents, including pleadings, affidavits and orders, which were a part of the record, but compiled for the convenience of reference.
The fourth volume would comprise statutory enactments and research material such as statutes, rules, regulations, legislative debates, report of Commissions and other such material like research articles.
The fifth and last volume would comprise precedents. As per the communique, this volume would consist of the judgements arranged topic-wise or chronologically as decided by the nodal counsel.
Further, the Counsel relying on foreign cases should provide PDF copies of the decisions relied on by them to the nodal counsel in this volume, along with neutral citations.
The third, fourth and fifth volume should contain material relied on by both the sides. These include additional written submissions/documents/statutory material/precedents, which should be applied only with the permission of the Court.
The communique said all volumes should be submitted in PDF format only having Times New Roman font of size 12.5. There should be 2.54 cm margins on all sides (‘Normal’ setting on MS Word). The line spacing should be set at 2. The running pages and PDF pages must be the same and the PDF must be bookmarked. It further said that the index should be hyperlinked.
It said the written submissions must highlight the name of the counsel and the Senior Advocate, if any. The written submissions should also reflect the name of the party for which they are being filed.
If the Court has permitted filing of some additional material, they should be given continuous page numbers and filed in the appropriate volume. Further, the documents should be indexed and bookmarked accordingly.
As per the communique, the arguing counsel and Senior Advocates, through their AORs, must inform the nodal counsel about the tentative timelines for their oral arguments at least five days prior to the commencement of the hearing;
It said the nodal counsel should prepare and present to the Court a statement of proposed timelines for all counsels. The Apex Court would then finalise and prescribe the timelines for oral arguments, said the commonique, adding that this prescription should be adhered to by all counsels.