Following a Court of Appeal decision last year, the Courts are clamping down on missed deadlines or failure to comply with Orders of the Court, the Civil Procedure Rules and their connected Practice Directions.
What this means to you is that you simply must not let court documents fester away in the hope that someone somewhere will deal with them at some point. We are here to help you avoid that problem. So the moment you receive any court papers, no matter how straight-forward they may appear, you ought to be discussing them with us.
This is especially important when a County Court Claim is made against you. Do not delay because if Judgment is given as a consequence of there being no response from you within the short timescale allowed, you will first need to pay £155 to apply to have that Judgment set aside. Then you will need to convince a Judge that there was good reason for you not having defended the Claim on time. And woe betide the person who delays in making an Application to set aside that Default Judgment.
An Application to do just that recently failed on Appeal even though the Default Judgment was given in favour of the Claimant despite them having brought the Claim outside of the six year limit. A party against whom a Judgment in Default has been entered had a clear obligation to apply promptly to set aside judgment.
Cases such as these remind us all that the courts are now much less forgiving with those who miss deadlines. But also we need to ensure that whatever the court tells the parties to do, they simply must do it and we, at Lawgistics, will need to be equally as vigilant in ensuring that we meet with all the technical requirements of the Civil Procedure Rules.
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