Letter: through to the bench

I thought the Journal’s readers might agree with a pet peeve of mine about why sheriffs don’t seem willing to deal with routine matters by phone and/or email.

I was talking a while ago to a lawyer who used to practise in Glasgow and had moved to England to practise there. I was quite surprised to hear her say that the English judges she dealt with were entirely happy to deal with various matters by phone, and on occasion were quite prepared to grant orders on the basis of telephone conversations and emails.

Readers may be aware that at Glasgow the sheriffs in the family court are happy to discharge hearings without appearance on the basis of emails from agents confirming agreement. I don’t know whether other courts operate the same way. In addition, we already have case management hearings by phone in some types of case.

I think in this area we could learn something from the English. I’ve often wanted just to pick up a phone and be able to discuss routine issues with a sheriff. In fact, there was time when a few of the sheriffs in the family court were entirely happy to do that, and were also happy to reply to emails. Like so many other courts now, Glasgow Sheriff Court no longer has a switchboard and I can’t now just call and ask to be put through to a sheriff.

What prompted this letter was a recent episode when my colleague had to travel to an out-of-town court just to update the sheriff about a contact case in which the father lived in England. At the pervious hearing, we had more or less agreed matters but were asked to submit a draft interlocutor after concluding discussions with the father on the detail of the arrangements. The process had taken longer than anticipated, but I don’t understand why the sheriff couldn’t just have called to speak to us, or sent an email.

This is a legal aid case and my colleague’s time is going to have to be paid for out of the public purse.

I do reports for the court in various types of case and would like to be able to contact sheriffs to discuss these, but can’t. I recently had a serious query that needed to be addressed urgently in an adoption report I was working on. I just couldn’t get a quick response from the court as to the best way to make an arrangement to speak to the sheriff concerned, and all the clerk could do was to forward my email to the sheriff.

It wouldn’t be impossible surely to have guidelines about what matters would be appropriate for informal contact by phone/email. I do appreciate sheriffs will want to maintain a professional distance, and I can guess sheriffs might very well have ideas about which lawyers they would not be so keen to hear from that often…!

What do readers think? Should it be possible to contact sheriffs directly, and if so how and in what circumstances?