Non-party disclosure requests are rarely welcome. All too often a broad request for documents comes in, said to be relevant to litigation of which you might be completely unaware. The result? Costs in dealing with the request and, further, the risk that this is just a back-door way of dragging you into the dispute.
The courts’ power to order non-party disclosure is set out in Civil Procedure Rule (CPR) 31.17. First, the applicant must show that the documents requested are likely to support its case or adversely affect the case of another party; secondly, disclosure must be necessary in order to dispose fairly of the claim or to save costs. These provisions are not dissimilar to those in CPR31.16, which deal with pre-action disclosure. Although there is a wealth of decisions on CPR31.16 – SES Contracting and others v UK Coal and others [2007] is a recent example on a fraud claim – there are relatively few authorities on CPR31.17.
