Making headlines!
We’ve been fortunate enough as a business to have been in the news on more than one occasion, and always for the right reasons!
We’ve been on TV.
We’ve been in several newspapers.
And I’ve been interviewed on the radio!
Now I’m in the news again, even though my name doesn’t actually feature.
The link above relates to a case that I was involved in. The Defendant called me a few weeks before the hearing, telling me that the other side had failed to comply with directions, and he wanted to instruct me to make an application to have the Claimant struck out.
I told him not to. Not because I didn’t want the work (I always want more work!) but because it was the wrong way to go about it. I told him how the court was likely to view the other side’s conduct, and that all he had to do was turn up, explain his position in the way that I outlined to him, and leave the Judge to do the rest.
Sure enough, the Defendant did exactly what I said (he tells me that he even read out verbatim a few of the points that I had made to him) and the Judge completely agreed. The Claimant sought leave to appeal, but because he clearly hadn’t taken any legal advice, his claim failed and the case against the Defendant was struck out.
If you’re involved in a small claims matter, it’s not unreasonable to think that you don’t need legal advice, as the rules are quite straight forward and the system is aimed to enable litigants in person to run cases without running up big legal bills. However, there are still significant consequences for getting it wrong, as the Claimant in this case found out. It would have been a good investment for them to have spent a small amount with someone like me, to make sure that they’d dotted all of their I’s and crossed their Ts, if only to avoid ending up in the newspapers for all the wrong reasons!
Kleyman & Co Solicitors. The full service law firm. As good in print as we are in person!