Court deadlines MUST be met

Despite our client missing their court deadline, they still won their case on the day.

However, missing a court deadline puts you at a high risk of having your defence struck out and the consumer getting a win in default, leaving you with an unwanted county court judgment (CCJ).

Our advice is ALWAYS follow the directions of the court until you have been told, by the court, otherwise. This applies from the moment a claim form is delivered to you, right up to the point the judgment is given at the final hearing.

However, we do not live in a perfect world, and sometimes deadlines are missed. On those occasions, the best you can do is try and remedy it straight away. This will usually mean making a formal application to the court – for which the court will charge you £275.

In a recent case, a Lawgistics member transferred their court case over to our dedicated litigation service partway through their claim (Lawgistics itself doesn’t deal with court cases, only our sister company, Lawgistics Litigation for the Motor Trade CIC, can legitimately do so). The dealer had already missed the deadline for their witness statement to be filed and served. We pointed this out to them and proceeded to draft an application to ask the court to allow their late witness statement, as without an accepted witness statement, our dealer would not be allowed to speak in the hearing. The court agreed to hear our application on the day of the hearing. Unfortunately, the judge was not in a forgiving mood and decided that as the court order giving the deadline for file and service of the witness statement was clear on the court order, they did not care that our dealer was unrepresented at the time and had no advice about it. The judge said no to allowing the witness statement. However, we had instructed an advocate to represent our client and provided the advocate with, we hoped, enough detail so they were able to defend the case regardless. Fortunately, there is a rule that allows our client to rely on what they had put in their initial defence. Luckily, even without the witness statement, our client won the case thanks to the good work of the appointed advocate.

Had the dealer not transferred to our litigation service and not agreed to the instruction of an advocate, they would likely have lost the case. Litigation is not cheap – check out the costs of your local solicitors’ firms. Lawgistics members have the option of receiving subsidised litigation help if they transfer the case to our sister company, Lawgistics Litigation, which was specifically set up to provide subsidised litigation support to those in our industry, on industry matters. To be clear, neither Lawgistics nor our Litigation CIC advises on anything else but motor trade-related issues for motor traders. We do not help consumers, we do not do divorce law. We are niche to the motor trade, and proudly so.