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 shared. The rules are slightly different in cases running under the pilots. If a transparency order has been made in a pilot case there are some documents that we are allowed to see, and the order will tell you which those are (see below).

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
• in a pilot case you can send us (or ask your lawyer to send us) certain documents identified in the Pilot Guidance (see para 36 onwards here).

What you need to know:

• If a hearing is online or hybrid we will most likely attend remotely (i.e. by video link). We rely upon volunteers and it is not always feasible for them to travel long distances to attend court.
• 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.