In the commonwealth countries around the world, the case most often quoted to determine relevance of documents is Compagnie Financier v. Peruvian Guano, known simply as the Peruvian Guano case. This was a dispute between companies over the mining of large reserves of bird guano fertilizer. In this case the court also set out the legal tests to determine when documents are relevant, and therefore must be produced, as opposed to when they are not relevant and need not be produced. The fact that the legal test to determine whether documents are crap or not, happens to come from a case with such a name, has always made lawyers and judges smile.
I had been traveling through the north and south island of New Zealand for three weeks, when my sailing friends arrived. Doug Hawkins, Deb Jandrlich and Mike Sullivan. Janice Lo would join us later. Mike, Deb’s partner, was here to visit nz with us, offer his skills for boat maintenance, then fly back to Vancouver. Myself, Doug, Deb and Janice were to sail Illusion back to Vancouver, taking four months to do this. And the boat should have been in good shape for us. Continue reading “The Peruvian Guano Case – post by John”