Município de Mariana & Ors v BHP Group (UK) Ltd & Anor (Ruling on sample agreements)

In managing a staged trial, the court may refuse to add further sample agreements where the parties have not had a proper opportunity to assess the implications and their inclusion risks expanding or complicating the issues. Amendments or additional issues based on existing pleadings may remain appropriate at a late stage, but adding materially different sample agreements is not. If the additional agreements raise no issues beyond those already identified, the court’s ruling on the existing issues will apply to them automatically.

The claim concerned issues arising from settlement agreements, including agreements involving indigenous communities. The defendants invited the court to add two or three further sample agreements to the dataset for consideration in the Stage 1 trial. The court had to decide whether it was appropriate to expand the sample at that stage, having regard to the parties’ preparation and the possibility that the agreements raised additional collective-agreement issues.

1. The invitation to add the additional sample agreements was declined. The parties had not had an adequate opportunity to work through the implications of their inclusion, and adding them risked causing adverse effects on the Stage 1 trial.
2. At that stage, limited tweaks to the issues, or specific additional issues grounded in the existing pleadings, were appropriate and to be commended. That did not justify introducing further sample agreements with potentially distinct and wider issues.
3. If the additional agreements raised no issues beyond those already identified, the court’s ruling on those existing issues would automatically apply to them. If they raised separate issues, those issues might not be addressed, or might require a wide-ranging additional investigation, reducing the utility of adding the agreements.
4. The additional samples were therefore excluded from the dataset for the settlement issues.