If you are reading this after a decision has gone against somebody, the most useful thing we can do is correct one expectation straight away, because it determines what you should be doing this week. An appeal is not the case heard again. The witnesses do not come back. The evidence is not led a second time. Nobody starts afresh with a clean sheet and a better explanation. What happens instead is that a different question is asked about material that already exists — not what happened, which was the trial’s question, but whether the decision can stand on this record. A different question needs different material, and that is why the work in front of you is not what most families think it is. From it follows the sentence that governs everything else, and we will not soften it: what did not go into the record below is, in practice, not available above. Not out of technicality — simply because there is nothing there for the appeal to look at. Which gives you one test to apply to every single thing you want to say: is it in the record? That test sorts hope from work in about ten minutes, and it has a painful corollary that we have had to deliver more than once. Anything set aside during the trial on the thought that it could be dealt with later generally ended on that day; nobody said so at the time, because nobody expected to need it. So the trial record is now the most valuable object in your matter — and most families do not hold a complete copy of it, having assumed it would simply arrive. It will not. Which makes the single most useful thing available to you today completely unglamorous: start obtaining certified copies of the record now, before anybody asks, because soon after a matter concludes this is a request, and much later the same thing becomes a search. And the clock does not pause while you assemble papers. One more thing worth knowing before you spend effort in the wrong place. Whoever reads this appeal was not in the room — no memory of the trial, no sense of any witness, no context at all. They have a bundle. What was obvious to everybody present and never written down did not, for this purpose, happen, which is why a complete, ordered, indexed file is not tidiness but the only channel you have. Our limits, stated plainly: we do not draft grounds, argue anything, advise on merits or forum, or estimate your chances — those are your advocate’s, entirely. We do the record.
What this guide covers
Almost every family we meet at this stage is carrying the same expectation, and it is an entirely reasonable one: that an appeal is the chance to present the case properly, with the things that did not get said last time.
It is not, and hearing that early saves weeks of effort spent in the wrong place. The purpose of this page is not to discourage anybody. It is to point the effort at the thing that will actually matter.
Concretely, so that nobody is holding an expectation they have not examined.
None of that is a defect in the system. It follows from what an appeal is for, which is a different thing from what a trial is for.
Here is the whole of it, in one line. The trial asked what happened. The appeal asks whether the decision can stand on this record.
A different question needs different material. That is why the work in front of you now is not the work that was in front of you before, and why continuing to assemble the story is the commonest wasted month in this subject.
| The trial | The appeal | |
|---|---|---|
| What is being asked | What happened | Can this decision stand on this record |
| What it works from | Evidence as it is led | A record that is already closed |
| Who is speaking | Witnesses, in person | Nobody new |
| What helps you | Telling it well | Being able to point at a page |
| What is useless | Very little, early on | Anything not on the record |
Read the last row. That is the entire reason this page exists, and the reason our service is what it is.
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The record is fixed. It was being built throughout the trial, by everybody involved, often without anybody thinking of it that way, and at some point it stopped being built.
Nothing can be added to it now by wishing, by remembering, or by explaining. That is not a rule somebody could be persuaded to relax; it is the condition the appeal operates under.
Without going into procedure, the shape of it is this.
Notice the second and third items. A document that existed but was never exhibited is not in the record. A thing a witness clearly meant but which was not taken down that way is, for this purpose, what was taken down.
For every single thing you want to say in the appeal, ask: is this in the record?
If it is, it can be pointed to, and pointing at a page is the strongest thing available at this stage. If it is not, it is a thing you know rather than a thing the appeal can see — and however certain you are of it, however unfair that feels, it does not change what is on the paper.
Families find this test brutal for about a day and useful for ever afterwards, because it tells you where to put your effort. Ten minutes with that question will do more than a month of gathering.
And then the part we have had to say more than once, and which lands hard every time.
Anything that was set aside during the trial on the basis that it could be dealt with later generally ended on that day. Nobody said so at the time. Nobody expected to need it. The discovery arrives now.
We are not saying that to assign blame, and in most cases there is none to assign — decisions get made under pressure, with incomplete information, by people doing their best. We say it because it is the clearest possible argument for the one thing still fully in your control: make sure nothing further is lost the same way from here on.
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Follow that through and you arrive somewhere counter-intuitive. In a matter of this kind, the most valuable object is not the judgment, not the advocate’s opinion and not any new material.
It is the record. Everything the appeal can do, it does from there. Every argument that can be made has to be anchored in it. Every passage that will be relied on is somewhere inside it. It is, quite literally, the raw material of the entire next stage.
And here is the thing that surprises people, because it seems impossible: most families, at the point of deciding to appeal, do not have a complete copy of it.
This is not carelessness. Nobody hands it over as a matter of course. Through a long trial a family receives documents in pieces, keeps some, loses others, and never at any point holds the whole thing in one place. The absence is invisible until the moment it matters.
Open the folder and check honestly, because the gap is usually larger than expected.
| What families typically hold | What is usually missing |
|---|---|
| A copy of the judgment | What the witnesses actually said, as recorded |
| Some of what their own side filed | Most of what the other side filed |
| A few exhibits, often photographs of them | The list of what was exhibited and what was not |
| Dates, in a diary or in memory | The orders made on those dates |
The right-hand column is the appeal’s working material. The left-hand column is what most people set out with.
So the single most useful thing you can do this week is begin obtaining certified copies of the record — today, before anybody asks you for them, and regardless of what else is undecided.
It is unglamorous. It does not feel like fighting. It is the step that everything else depends on, and it is the one families postpone because it feels administrative at a moment when they want to be doing something that matters.
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The reason for urgency is mechanical rather than dramatic, and it is worth understanding so that it is believed.
Soon after a matter concludes, asking for copies is a request. Much later, the same thing becomes a search — because files move, offices reorganise, and the people who knew where something was are no longer the people sitting there.
Nothing about obtaining a record gets easier with time. Several things about it get harder, and none of the hardening is visible until you are in the middle of it.
There is a limit on how long an appeal can be brought in. We are deliberately not printing a figure, for two reasons: it is not uniform, and the figure is not the useful part anyway.
The useful part is this. The clock does not pause while you assemble papers. Families lose weeks gathering material in complete good faith and then discover that time was running throughout.
So two things happen on day one, and they happen in parallel rather than one after the other. Ask your advocate what the position on time is in your case. And begin obtaining the record the same day, whatever the answer turns out to be.
It happens often, and far more often than people admit to, because admitting it feels like admitting fault. It is not usually fault. Matters of this kind arrive in the middle of illness, money trouble, an advocate who stopped responding, or simply not knowing what was supposed to happen next.
Being late is a separate thing that has to be addressed, and it is frequently addressable. What it is not is something to hide or to discover later.
Here is the thing worth knowing, and it is the reason this belongs on a documentation page at all.
Delay is addressed with documents, not with an explanation offered across a counter. Whatever was happening in that period has to be evidenced, and delay is survivable far more often when it is documented than when it is merely described.
Which gives you something concrete to do immediately: start collecting whatever shows what was going on. Records of treatment. Correspondence with a previous advocate, or the absence of it. Anything dated that places you where you were. Gather it now while it is gatherable, and put it in front of your advocate at once rather than waiting to be asked.
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Now the point that explains why we care so much about how a file is assembled, because until you see it from the other side it sounds like fussiness.
Whoever reads this appeal was not in the room. No memory of the trial. No sense of what a witness was like. No feel for which moment mattered and which was noise. No accumulated context of any kind. They have a bundle of paper, and whatever is argued from it.
That is not a criticism of anybody. It is simply the position the reader is in, and designing for it is the whole art of putting an appeal file together.
From which follows something families find genuinely hard to absorb. A great deal of what everybody in that courtroom understood was never written down, because it did not need to be — everybody present already knew it.
For this purpose, it did not happen. The atmosphere of a day. How a witness came across. What was plainly implied but not said. The thing everybody understood from a look. None of it is in the bundle, so none of it exists.
This is also why an honest account from a family member of what the trial was really like, however accurate, cannot be used. It is not disbelieved. There is simply nowhere for it to go.
Put those together and the conclusion is not sentimental. The assembled file is the only channel between everything that happened and the person who will decide whether the decision stands.
Everything you want considered has to travel down it. Anything that cannot be found inside it, under pressure, in the moment it is needed, is effectively not there even when it technically is.
Which turns three apparently clerical things into substantive ones.
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And there is an economics to this that families consistently underestimate.
A bundle nobody can navigate consumes time from the one person in this whole matter whose time you are actually paying for. Every hour your advocate spends hunting for a page is an hour not spent on the thing you engaged them for.
Put bluntly, a well-made file is among the cheapest ways to buy more of your advocate’s attention, and it is the only one entirely within your control.
Of everything on this page, this is the distinction families find hardest, and it is worth slowing down for because it governs the whole exercise.
A document you possess is not a document in the record. Those are two different states, and the first does not imply the second. Something can sit in your cupboard throughout the entire trial, be entirely genuine, be plainly relevant — and not be in the record, because it never formally went in.
Families discover this at the worst moment. They produce a paper, confident that it is already part of the case because it was shown to somebody, mentioned, handed over at a meeting, or sent to their own advocate. None of those is the same thing. Being shown to a person is not being put in a record.
You cannot reliably tell by looking at your own copy, which is the frustrating part, and that is precisely why the record has to be obtained before anybody reasons about what is available.
What you can do in the meantime is make a list, and it is a genuinely useful piece of work.
When the record arrives, that list is what it gets checked against, and the checking takes an afternoon instead of a fortnight. Done the other way round — record first, then trying to remember — it is far slower and far less reliable, because reading the record reshapes what you think you remember.
It will, somewhere, and it is better to expect it than to meet it as a shock in the middle of reading.
A witness said something you remember differently. A date is not the date your family has repeated to each other for two years. An answer that felt decisive in the room reads as unremarkable on paper. This happens in almost every file and it is not evidence that anything was tampered with.
Two ordinary things explain nearly all of it. Memory of a stressful period is not a transcript — it compresses, it reorders, and it sharpens whatever mattered emotionally. And what is recorded is a rendering, made in real time, in a particular language, by somebody writing quickly.
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Note it, and do not argue with the page. Specifically:
One more thing, said gently because it is the harder possibility. Sometimes the record is right and the memory is wrong, and a family that has built its sense of the case around a remembered moment finds that very difficult. Discovering it privately, early, from the record, is a great deal better than discovering it in any other way.
Families read the judgment for its conclusion, which is natural and which is also the least useful way to read it. Read it a second time as a map of the record and it starts doing work for you.
A judgment tells you three things that matter enormously at this stage, and none of them is the outcome.
That third item is the one nobody uses, and it is the most informative.
Something your family remembers clearly as central, which does not appear anywhere in the judgment, is a thing to go and check in the record. Not because its absence means anything by itself, but because there are only a few explanations and they are all worth knowing.
It might have been there and simply not discussed. It might never have gone in at all — which is the painful possibility and the one worth finding out about now rather than later. Or the family’s memory of it may differ from what was actually recorded, which happens constantly and is nobody’s fault, because memory of a stressful year is not a transcript.
What you do with that is not an argument, and we are not suggesting one. It is a list of things to check against the record when it arrives, prepared before the record arrives, which is the most productive use of the waiting period available to you. Hand that list to your advocate along with the file.
One discipline while doing it: write down what you remember before you re-read the judgment, not after. Reading it first reshapes the memory, and then the comparison tells you nothing.
Families arrive at this stage carrying material gathered with enormous effort, usually over weeks, usually by several people. It is worth being honest about it, because the effort is real and the honesty is kinder than letting it continue.
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Apply the one test and the pattern is immediate: none of it is in the record. These are answers to a different question than the one being asked.
That is not the same as saying any of it is foolish. Most of it is an expression of how much people care and of how badly they want to do something. The kindest thing available is to say early that the effort belongs elsewhere — almost always on obtaining the record, which is the one thing nobody has and everybody needs.
This one deserves its own paragraph because it is the most common and the most emotionally loaded.
Take it to your advocate, now rather than later, because whether it can be used turns entirely on specifics we are not qualified to assess. What we will say is that this is the single most frequent thing brought to us at this stage, and that the usual answer is not the one families are hoping for. That is a reason to raise it immediately and a reason not to let it become the plan.
Gathering these is often the first thing a community does, and it is done with real generosity. If your advocate asks for material of that nature for a specific purpose, that is a different matter and we will prepare it properly.
Unprompted, though, it is effort spent in the one place where effort cannot currently reach. If there are people willing to help, the most valuable thing they can do is assist with obtaining and organising the record — which is tedious, which nobody volunteers for, and which is the actual bottleneck.
Can anything new come in at all? Occasionally, in circumstances that are narrow and specific, and whether your case is inside them is a question for your advocate on the actual material rather than a question for a website.
We are not going to set out the criteria, and the reason is the same as everywhere else on this page: a family that reads criteria will measure itself against them and arrive at an answer. That assessment is not ours to invite.
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Raise it early, hope modestly, and do not make it the plan. A family that has been counting on new material takes the answer very badly at a point when it can least afford another blow — and the weeks spent on it were weeks the record needed.
One more thing to know, said plainly rather than gloomily, because knowing it helps you allocate effort correctly.
This does not start from neutral ground. Somebody has already considered the matter and decided against you, and that decision is now the thing to be displaced rather than a blank page to write on. An appeal is not a coin toss conducted afresh.
The useful consequence of that, rather than the dispiriting one.
A retelling has already been heard once and did not carry. What has not been done is a precise, navigable presentation of what the record actually contains — and that is the one thing still entirely available to you.
Which is why we keep returning to the same unglamorous instruction. Put your weight behind the record. It is the part of this where effort reliably converts into something usable.
At this stage a family usually has several people offering to help and very little for them to do, which produces the letters and the testimonials and the long written accounts. Here is what would genuinely move things, listed because nobody ever asks for it.
If there is one thing to redirect willing hands towards, it is the second and the fourth. A dated timeline and a careful check of what came back are worth more to this file than any quantity of letters, and both can be done by somebody with no legal training at all.
It also helps the people doing it. At this stage the hardest thing for a family is having nothing useful to do with the energy, and these are real tasks with visible results rather than busywork.
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Our work, described plainly, so that it is clear what is being bought.
The distinction matters and is routinely missed by people doing this themselves. A photocopy is a photocopy. A certified copy is a copy that carries an attestation of what it is a copy of, and in a setting where a passage will be relied on, that difference is the whole point.
Getting the right kind in the first instance also saves a round trip, which in this subject is not a small matter: the same journey made twice is weeks, and the second journey is always harder than the first. Where you also need certified copies of your own personal documents for the file, that is ordinary work and is best done at the same time.
The most undervalued step, and the one that distinguishes doing this properly from doing it quickly.
What comes back in response to a request is frequently incomplete, and the gaps are not announced. A date with no order attached to it. A witness whose evidence stops mid-way. An exhibit referred to that is not in the bundle. Nobody will tell you that something is absent — you find out by reading what arrived against what should have arrived, and that is a deliberate exercise rather than something that happens by itself.
It is also why we give you a written note of what we could not obtain. A file that looks complete and is not is worse than one that is honestly marked, because somebody will rely on the appearance.
If any part of the record is in a language other than the one it will be read in, that is a known problem with a known solution and a long lead time, and it must be started early rather than discovered late.
Translation of a record is not a casual job. A passage will be relied on, so the translation has to correspond exactly, and the translation of a long record takes real time. Leaving it until somebody asks is the commonest avoidable delay in a file of this kind.
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One practical point that catches people. A record is frequently mixed — some parts in one language, some in another, sometimes within a single document, often with terms left untranslated because everybody present understood them.
That is manageable and it has to be handled consistently across the whole file rather than document by document, or the same term ends up rendered three different ways in three places. For a reader who was not there, three renderings of one word look like three different things.
Common at this stage and entirely legitimate, and it changes the documentation position in one specific way worth planning for.
Whatever the previous advocate holds was assembled for their own use. Obtaining it can be straightforward, or it can be slow, and it is not something to depend on while time is running. Begin obtaining the record independently rather than waiting, and treat anything that does come across as a bonus that saves work rather than as the plan.
And the distinction underneath that, which is worth holding even if you are staying with the same advocate.
An advocate’s working file is not the record. It is a selection, made for a purpose, by somebody who also held the rest in their head. It may be missing things that were never needed at trial and are needed now, and it was never intended to be a complete copy.
So assume the record has to be obtained from source, whoever is acting. Being pleasantly surprised is a better position than being short of a document in the week it matters.
The span shown against this service is the kind of period a matter of this sort runs over, and we want to be straight about how little of it is ours.
| Phase | Whose | Can it be compressed? |
|---|---|---|
| Working out what must be obtained | Ours | Yes — it is done in days |
| Waiting for copies to come back | The offices holding them | Only by starting earlier |
| Collating, certifying, indexing | Ours | Yes, and it runs alongside the waiting |
| Translation, where needed | Partly ours | Only by starting earlier |
| Everything after the file is ready | The court and your advocate | No |
Our part is measured in weeks and is mostly governed by how quickly copies arrive. The long part belongs to a calendar nobody here controls — and the only lever anybody has on the whole span is the first row, which is why we keep saying start now.
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Very little, and it is worth stating exactly what the honest version sounds like so that you can recognise the dishonest one.
Anybody who offers you a figure for your chances before reading the record has not read the record. That is not a judgement about their integrity — it is arithmetic about what they could possibly know.
Occasionally somebody approaches a family at this stage and suggests, in one form of words or another, that a result can be arranged.
We will not assist with anything of that kind, in any way, at any stage. And the practical advice, which matters more than our refusal: tell your advocate that it was offered. An approach like that is a reason for caution about whoever made it, and families in distress are specifically targeted because distress makes people stop asking obvious questions.
There is more than one way a decision can be challenged, and they are not interchangeable. Which one fits a given situation turns on things we cannot see and are not qualified to assess.
So we are not going to compare them here, and if you have been told which route applies, that advice came from somebody who read the papers and ours would not. We maintain revision as a separate service precisely because the documentation side is engaged either way; which one you are actually in is your advocate’s call.
Which leads to a genuinely reassuring fact, and one of the few on this page.
The record has to be obtained, checked, certified and indexed whichever route is taken. So the documentation work is not a bet on a particular path — it is the common foundation underneath all of them, and starting it before the route is settled wastes nothing.
That is the strongest practical argument for beginning today rather than waiting until everything is decided. There is almost nothing else in this subject that can be done before the decisions are made.
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Then everything on this page becomes more urgent, and one thing needs saying clearly: liberty and the appeal are separate matters running at the same time, and the first is a question for your advocate immediately rather than something to raise once the file is ready.
That side has its own considerations and its own services — regular and interim applications are separate work — and we are not the people to advise on any of it. What we do is treat the record work as urgent rather than routine, because in that situation every document that arrives late costs something real and unrecoverable.
An uncomfortable subject that is better raised by us than discovered by you, because the commonest avoidable disaster at this stage is not legal at all.
The most expensive mistake is running out of money halfway. A matter abandoned midway has cost everything it cost and bought nothing, and the decision to stop is almost never taken calmly — it is taken under pressure, at the worst moment, by people who have already spent more than they planned.
The shape of the spending is worth understanding because it is counter-intuitive. The documentation cost is front-loaded: it happens in the first weeks, it is largely knowable in advance, and once it is done it is done. Your advocate’s engagement is spread across a long period that nobody can predict precisely. And the incidental costs — copies, journeys, translation where the record is long — are small individually and accumulate in a way people do not budget for.
Which suggests one conversation, had early and once, rather than a series of surprises. Ask your advocate to set out the engagement across the whole expected span rather than for the next step. Ask us for the documentation figure including the parts we do not charge for — what offices themselves take, and roughly what translation will come to once we see the volume. Put the two together before committing, not after.
And one honest warning about pricing in this field generally. A low figure for a long matter is not a kindness and a high one is not a guarantee. What protects you is knowing the shape of the whole thing in advance, and being told plainly when something falls outside what was quoted rather than finding it on a bill.
However it ends, you will be left holding a file, and it is worth keeping properly rather than putting it in a cupboard.
A matter of this kind generates questions for years — from an institution, from a future advocate, sometimes from the person themselves wanting to understand what happened. A complete, indexed record is the first thing anybody will ask for. We can digitise it so that it is searchable rather than merely stored, and keep it in order on an ongoing basis if you want that.
Four kinds of enquiry, and the first conversation differs sharply between them.
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Sequencing, because in this work the order of operations decides the elapsed time.
And the output, so that there is no ambiguity about what arrives.
The line, and on this page it is drawn harder than anywhere else we work.
Stated as refusals, so that nothing has to be discovered mid-engagement.
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Our part on a criminal appeal file — establishing what has to be obtained and from where, requesting and chasing it, checking what comes back against what was asked for, obtaining certification, collating, paginating and indexing the whole record, identifying and arranging translation where needed, and handing over a clean paper and digital set with a written note of whatever could not be obtained — is ₹24,999.
The 3 – 18 months shown against this service is the span a matter of this kind tends to run over, and as the table above sets out, very little of it is ours. We say that at the start rather than let a figure imply we are in control of a court’s calendar.
What stays separate, and why:
And the framing, because families at this stage are vulnerable and we would rather be useful than merely engaged. What you are paying us for is that the record exists, in your hands, complete and navigable, as early as possible. That is not the glamorous part of an appeal and it is the part that is reliably within reach. If what you actually need first is advice on whether to appeal at all, say so and we will tell you to get that before you spend anything with us — a perfectly assembled file for a decision that should not have been taken is still the wrong decision, well documented.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.
We work out what has to be obtained and from where, request and chase it, check what comes back against what was asked for, get it certified, and hand you the whole record in order, paginated and indexed, in paper and digital form — with a written note of anything that could not be obtained. We do not draft grounds, advise on merits, or estimate chances.
The settled ideas underneath this page — and the unusual amount it declines to say
This page describes a working method rather than a legal position, and it rests on three principles that are not controversial and do not need a provision number to be useful.
An appellate proceeding is a review of a decision, not a rehearing of a dispute. The function of an appeal is to examine whether a conclusion is sustainable on the material that was before the original forum, rather than to determine the matter afresh. Everything this page says about the closed record, about the changed question, and about why material gathered afterwards generally cannot be used, follows from that single idea.
The record is a defined thing, and it is what is reviewed. Proceedings produce a formal record — pleadings, exhibits, depositions as recorded, interlocutory orders and the judgment — and it is that record, rather than anybody’s account of the proceedings, which the appellate forum reads. Admitting material outside it is an exception rather than the ordinary course, and it is narrow and fact-specific, which is why this page states its existence and refuses to state its contours.
Limitation applies, and delay is a matter to be established rather than asserted. A right of appeal is exercisable within a period, and where it has not been, the position is addressed on material showing why — which is the formal basis for this page’s practical point that delay is answered with documents rather than with an explanation.
What this page deliberately does not state. No provision numbers. No limitation period, because it is not uniform and a reader would rely on it. No grounds, no criteria for the admission of further material, and nothing that could be read as an assessment of whether any particular case has a prospect. No forum is named and no comparison between the available routes is offered, because which applies is a judgement on facts. No figure, range or impression of likelihood appears anywhere, deliberately: a family given a number plans around it, and nobody who has not read the record is in a position to supply one. Nothing here is legal advice, nothing here resolves any question in your matter, and every question of grounds, route, forum, merits, timing and liberty belongs to an advocate instructed on your own facts — which, where somebody is in custody or time is running, is a matter of days rather than weeks.
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