Bourns Inc. v Raychem Corporation and Another (No.3)
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judgment Date | 17 November 1998 |
| Date | 17 November 1998 |
| Court | Chancery Division |
Chancery Division
Before Mr Justice Laddie
Costs - payee disclosing documents - implied undertaking as to disclosed documents
Costs - payee disclosing documents - implied undertaking as to disclosed documents
A party ordered to pay costs who wished to challenge the bill could call on the taxing master to direct the payee to allow underlying documents to be produced to him but the master could not force the payee to do so.
However, if a payee did disclose such documents, the payer was bound by an implied undertaking, from which he could be released only by the payee or the court, to make no collateral use of them.
Mr Justice Laddie so held in the Chancery Division, in holding that the first respondent, Raychem Corporation, a company incorporated in the USA, and the second, third and fourth respondents, Clifford Chance, Rowe & Maw and Latham & Watkins, the lawyers Raychem chose to employ in certain UK taxation proceedings involving the petitioner, Bourns Inc, another American company, were bound not to make any collateral use of any such documents disclosed to them in those proceedings, whether in litigation in England or elsewhere or otherwise.
Mr Michael Silverleaf, QC, for Raychem; Mr Michael Bloch, QC, for the respondents.
MR JUSTICE LADDIE said that Raychem owned a number of UK patents relating to positive temperature coefficient compositions, devices and applications. Bourns petitioned the Patent Court to revoke five of them.
Prior to a hearing in May 1997 Raychem had acknowledged that one of them must be revoked. By a judgment dated June 12, 1997 (reported sub nomRaychem Corporation's PatentsUNK ((1988) RPC 31) his Lordship had held the other four patents invalid and made an order for costs in favour of Bourns. On taxation of costs, Bourns had produced certain documents which had now been seen by all four respondents and also by the leader and another counsel engaged by Raychem to conduct its defence to proceedings by Bourns in the District Court for the Central District of California.
At the heart, now, of those proceedings was Raychem's belief that, as a result of seeing documents provided by Bourns in the UK taxation, a key witness for Bourns in both the UK and the USA proceedings had lied to both courts.
Procedure on taxation
Under Order 62, rule 29 of the Rules of the Supreme Court and Supreme Court Taxing Office Practice Direction (No 2 of 1992) (The Supreme Court...
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