Lawyers seem to like to engage themselves in preparing detailed witness statements containing argument, comment and documentary analysis. Yet the law reports contain numerous examples of judges deprecating such over-elaboration which often entails non-compliance with the rules. Cases are often highlighted by the invaluable legal blogger, Gordon Exall in his Civil Litigation Brief (www.civillitigationbrief.com ).
A useful current starting point is paragraph 19.3 of the latest Chancery Guide:
‘A witness statement should simply cover those issues, but only those issues, on which the party serving the statement wishes that witness to give evidence in chief. It should therefore be confined to facts of which the witness can give evidence. It is not, for example, the function of a witness statement to provide a commentary on the documents in the trial bundle, nor to set out quotations from such documents, nor to engage in matters of argument, expressions of opinion or submissions about the issues,
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