The relegation of the summary of the legal principles to a document to be tacked on to a judgment or cut and pasted into it by the transcribers is wrong in practice and may lead the judge to overlook important elements in it when reaching his or her decision. In particular (i) it is inappropriate to delegate to the transcriber the task of drafting an addendum setting out the law by extracting sections from counsel’s submissions. It is not the function of transcribers, who are not ordinarily provided with the court bundle, to compile sections of the judgment from other documents; (ii) even if it is possible for an appendix to be prepared in this fashion, it will not have been an agreed summary of the law, but merely an abstract from two documents; and (iii) such a course will not obviate the requirement for the judge to identify and apply the legal principles relevant to the issues to be determined (paras 34, 39, 40).

Where permission to appeal has been granted, no request for clarification should be submitted to the judge without the express approval of the appellate court. If, after permission to appeal has been granted, a party considers it necessary to seek clarification from the first instance judge, an application should be made to the Court of Appeal for a direction to that effect. That application should be accompanied by a draft of the proposed request. It is difficult to conceive of any circumstances in which, after permission to appeal has been granted, it would be appropriate simply to send the grounds of appeal to the judge and ask him to clarify his judgment in the light of those grounds (paras 38, 39, 40).