Consolidated practice directions

Requesting an eTrial 
 
7. 
All civil cases in the Court are case managed. The parties should 
indicate to the case manager where it will be appropriate to have an 
eTrial because the use of technology will improve the efficiency of the 
litigation. Alternatively, a case manager may order that the trial is to be 
an eTrial if the case manager is of the view that it would improve the 
efficiency of the trial.
8. 
The parties should confer in relation to the appropriateness of an eTrial 
as early as possible and, where it would be appropriate, the parties 
should inform the case manager.
9. 
The advantages of early identification include that discovery may also 
be given electronically which is particularly efficient where a large 
quantity of documents are already electronically stored (including 
emails, webpages, word processing files, images, sound recordings, 
videos and databases). It is then timely to adopt a protocol for the 
numbering of each party's discoverable electronic documents that will 
carry through to the use of these documents if required in an electronic 
trial bundle.
10. 
Parties may request an eTrial orally in a directions hearing or by 
preparing consent orders in the terms of the standard orders for eTrials 
in Practice Direction 1.2.5.1. 
 
Submitting the electronic trial bundle and papers for the judge
11.
If orders are made for an eTrial, the plaintiff must prepare and submit 
an electronic trial bundle on a Universal Serial Bus (
USB
) with: 
(a)
the submitted items contained in a single document folder; and 
(b)
an index of the submitted items in an excel spreadsheet. 
12. 
The set of standard directions for an eTrial of a civil action, which are 
attached to this Practice Direction, at 1.2.5.1, include directions for the 
electronic trial bundle to be delivered to the associate to the case 
manager or trial judge and to be served on the defendant. 
 

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1. Supreme Court Registry & Court of Appeal Office 
PD 1.2.5 
Supreme Court of Western Australia 
Consolidated Practice Direction
Index to the electronic trial bundle 
13. 
The index to the electronic trial bundle must be in an excel spreadsheet 
with the filename 'eTrial Bulk Upload Template.xlsx' as provided by the 
Court and prepared in accordance with these Practice Directions. 
Submitted items in the trial bundle 
14. 
It is possible for the Court to accept items in most formats, however the 
case manager may order that items be submitted in a specific file format. 
Where documents are submitted in .pdf format the document should be 
reproduced in colour and enhanced with optical character recognition. 
15. 
The exhibit number is the number that will be referred to in Court. Each 
exhibit number should attach only to one item in the trial bundle. The