legal fees – Legal Babble

A superb example of how the civil courts in the UK operate.

Laurel & Hardy-ish levels of incompetence from staff at Leeds Combined Court.

A hearing was set for last week and the appropriate Notice of Hearing was sent out for that case.

However what the merry pranksters at civil section failed to point out was that there were two other pending civil cases to be heard by the same High Court Judge at the same hearing on the same day.

No Notice of Hearing document was sent out in relation to these other two cases. Equally no Order in relation to them was made ahead of the hearing. In short no notification of these two other claims being in play that day at all.

Therefore there could be no case preparation for these other two claims as I was blithely unaware that these were due to go ahead in the same hearing as a claim that I was notified about.

This is pretty much par for the course with HMCTS these days: an organisation in which the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.

The consequence of this overall for court users is delay, confusion and ultimately injustice.

The consequence for your poor bloody correspondent is of course more time, effort and expense spent correcting the errors made by court staff.

Twist ending to the tale: an application in respect of this matter was sent to the court just a few moments ago with an inquiry as to what the fee would be to file this. The answer was returned almost immediately.

However a complaint about the poor standard of service in the failure to notify me of two cases to be heard hasn’t been answered at all.

Conclusion: HMCTS is more interested in taking your money to correct service level errors they’ve made than they are in responding to legitimate and justified complaints.

HMCTS has a number of ways of obtaining money from court users. Some of these amount to sharp practice and although within the Civil Procedure Rules can also be said to amount to an abuse of process.

Yesterday I discussed how difficult it is to obtain a refund from HMCTS (with an example!). Today I look at one of the ways they increase costs for parties.

Here’s one of the ways this happens.

An application in a civil claim was cancelled with a few days notice.

This is because the High Court Judge set to hear the case, The Hon. Mr Nicholas Lavender, decided to scuttle back to London before Yorkshire and the North East Circuit (for which he is senior civil judge) was put into tier three COVID restrictions. In the event this was pointless as a few days later the Government decided to lockdown the whole of England. However this caused significant disruption to civil listings at Leeds Combined Court this week. Great to see a judge who takes his leadership responsibilities so seriously.

The hearing was rescheduled with eight days notice to the parties. Which was insufficient notice for the Claimant. The Claimant informed the court of this and the grounds for being unable to attend the short-notice rescheduled hearing. Either these grounds were not out before the judge or else were ignored.

One facet of The Hon. Nicholas Lavender’s handling of cases can be seen on a website in which it’s complained that he seeks to drive up costs for litigants. Particularly ones whose cases he finds tiresome. I suppose he has to find some amusement in the job. This site can be found at https://www.bentjudgenicholaslavender.site/index.php/contact/ [viewed February 2020]. Some of the content of the site this writer is unable to verify: in respect of his seeking to drive up costs for parties however I am able to comment.

So consequently the grounds on which the Claimant couldn’t make the rescheduled hearing were ignored and an Order made by the judge regarding the rescheduled date. As per usual the route to challenge such an Order lies in the completion of an N244 form and the payment of a fee. Indeed this is the only route to do so when an Order has been made by the judge.

Now here’s where things get funky. In addition to driving up costs for parties he dislikes Nicholas Lavender likes to take his time on dealing with applications made. Sometimes this can be up to four months when HMCTS service standards say fourteen days should be the turnaround time for such.

So the court ignored the grounds for the Claimant not being able to attend the rescheduled date in order to make an application which would then cost the Claimant £55 to overturn. There is of course no guarantee that the application to vacate the rescheduled date would be heard before the due date of the hearing (especially not with this judge!) but hey… let’s take a punt on the idea of making some more money out of a service user.

This sort of thing represents clear sharp practice but is a common enough activity within HMCTS.

Tag: legal fees

Another Fine Mess… from Leeds Combined Court

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