Thanks for the updates today everyone, have just been catching up.
On the disclosure point - I know this looks and sounds particularly shocking and egregious, but there are regularly disclosure issues in litigation of all sorts. When you are preparing a case you are receiving hundreds or thousands of documents, and trying to make sense of them and order them in a sensible way. You have a professional duty to advise your client not to destroy documents and that they must disclose everything relevant, but it’s ultimately the client’s responsibility to make sure they’ve sent everything. It can be hard when preparing a case to know where the focus will be when you get to the hearing - you are preparing a whole case, so the laser focus on a small part at the hearing can be difficult to predict.
Here, the failure to disclose does seem on the more serious end of the spectrum because it appears to relate to the very heart of the procedure followed by Fife, which is obviously central to the case.
As others have said, breaches in disclosure mean either running around getting documents last minute (most common in my experience!), or sometimes negative inferences being drawn, and sometimes costs penalties.
In relation to Dr Upton’s notes, I am sure they’ll have had to be disclosed - everyone is referring to them and he has referenced them in his evidence so they’re probably annexed to his witness statement.