Clerking cock ups part two

Sometimes a cock up can arise from a failure to take basic steps.

A young barrister was once sent to Wales to do a case. This was a criminal case, on behalf of a defendant called Jones. The case was listed in Mold Crown Court, North Wales. That is a reasonable journey from Manchester, but eminently doable. However in those days the Wales and Chester circuit operated across all of Wales and Chester. That meant any particular case could start in one court but could be moved from one court centre to another. They would not normally be moved for example to South Wales, but a case from Mold could conceivably end up in Caernarvon in rare instances. That is obviously a considerable way away. Therefore if you happen to be sent to the wrong Welsh court to act for the Defendant, you could really find yourself in considerable trouble.

The young barrister set off bright and early, but had some car trouble on the way there which he was able to sort out. However it meant that, albeit arriving in good time, he was a little tighter for time than he would have liked. He then tried to find the case. Going from the sheets posted outside, it wasn't listed in any of the courts. He spoke to the ushers for each court to see if there was anything which had been missed off the printed list but none of them knew anything about this particular case and were sure it was not listed in the court room that they were working in. Then the barrister went to the listing office. If the people working in each court were convinced that the case wasn't there, the officials in the listing department were the only people who could help him.

Listing confirmed that the particular case was not listed that day in any court in Mold Crown Court, but said that it was possible that it had been transferred to another court and had been missed. Very helpfully, they went through the exercise of contacting all of the other courts in order to see what the position was. They told the barrister they would tannoy for him when they found out if the case was going ahead and if so where. He spent a nervous couple of hours in the court canteen drinking more coffee than was good for him, until the tannoy message gave his name and asked him to go immediately to listing. His concern was that he might have a two hour drive and then have to do a case in front of an extremely irate judge.

However that did not happen. He was told that that case was listed nowhere in North Wales. He was perplexed. However had his clerk managed to send him to do a case which had never been in any list? There was an answer to this, but it was one which listing had not spotted, probably because they would have regarded it is inconceivable that anyone could make such an error. The explanation was that there was another man called Jones whose hearing was to take place in Mold Crown Court that day. The clerk had seen the name Jones, knew that they had a case of that name coming up in Mold, and so sent the barrister off to do the case without even checking that the case number was the same. Thus it could have been any man called Jones

To say the barrister was speechless when told this was something of an understatement. This would have been bad enough if the name had been obscure, but Jones in Wales is even more common than Smith is in England. Not only was all the travel money for nothing, and not only had a court date been wasted, but he had had a singularly unpleasant time of it whilst waiting to find out if he was going to be sent off on a high-speed chase to conduct a case in front of a judge who would have it in for him from the start for no fault of his own.

There wasn't even a happy ending. When the case came back the barrister was unavailable and so he never ended up doing it.