Going to Court… Any Advice?

dont think they are bad people generally, but morally i would question them

Eh? They’re not bad people, but are questionable morally?

they will chat quite happily with you outside court, but when they get you in the box, they will try and totally dismantle your intergrity without a second thought.
afterwards they will chat with you agian as if nothing has happened.

You’re describing the nature of criminal advocacy. All criminal work goes to the heart of a person’s integrity. If the defendant is having his/her integrity scrutinised, isn’t it right that everyone else in the witness box undergoes the same?

It’s a job. In the same way coppers get drunk on a Friday night, but then arrest drink drivers on a Monday morning.

And peterfile’s right – the ones you describe are a narrow segment of the legal world.

I suspect their letter has somewhere at the top of it “without prejudice” or similar. Note that WP correspondence is generally not admissible to court.

They didn’t put that on their letter. How can I introduce it into the proceedings? Would you suggest I ask the judge if insisting on a hearing is “unreasonable”?

Your argument of negligence seems quite clear.
I guess it comes down to how the action of the lawyer is viewed in the eyes of the law.
Good luck
J.

Hi Shibboleth, sounds like a bit of a pain in the bum, hope your hearing goes ok

“they will chat quite happily with you outside court, but when they get you in the box, they will try and totally dismantle your intergrity without a second thought.
afterwards they will chat with you agian as if nothing has happened.”
surgeons are like that too happily chat away nice as pie then in theatre they stick a knife in you.

Shibboleth good luck, from what you say they sent you correspondence you replied (proof needed copy sent email) they did not get your reply and waited for it but otherwise did nothing. This should have been identified by file reviews and diary dates a lot earlier .

even poor firms have office procedures to one maintain diary dates so outstanding queries are chased and a long stop to identify files where no action is happening . The failure to have or operate this system is where their fault lies .

I have no legal expertise to offer you, but I hate solicitors so good luck.

Again, thanks for all the good luck wishes! It seems a lot of people have had bad experiences, but I have to agree with others that there are some bloody good ones too. I was just very unlucky to get a bad one for my divorce!

Crankboy, correct: I’m saying they should have chased me up if they thought I hadn’t replied – it was after all, the culmination of 18 months of wrangling. And secondly, even when I forwarded the email again on 3rd March, they failed to send them the letter!

But… I… MUST… REMAIN… CALM… 😉

This wasn’t you was it Shibboleth?

crankboy raises a good point – if you can show historically you had always replied promptly then again alarm bells shoudl have rung if they’d heard nothing.

If they didn’t chase then they’re not showign due dilligence.

I can prove that they chased up previous correspondence within 5 days in the past. I’ve also been advised by a former employee that they use a system called Proclaim, a case management package which they use to keep on top of this kind of thing.

Either way, it flies in the face of their client care letter in which they said “The firm aims to offer all of our client’s (sic) efficient and effective service and I am confident that we will do so in this case”.

Such shoddy use of apostrophes should have set my alarm bells ringing…

well….?

Any news?

lol another man gets taken to the cleaners by a woman, good good!!

Don’t try and bribe the Judge

OP I’ve defended a couple of claims by Party Lunatics Litigants.

Up here Sheriffs treat them pretty well. Sadly many claims are based on “it’s no’ fair” or just get personal/insulting or ranting.

It seems you have a claim and have worked out what it is so you are off to good start. Court costs rise quickly tho so best to neg a deal ASAP and walk away.

silver1999 – Member
lol another man gets taken to the cleaners by a woman, good good!!

I thought you were flouncing off and never coming back here? Starting to regret it already?

Didn’t take long for Shibby to hack you off silver1999, usually it takes a bit longer. Must be some kind of record.

Silver1999 “I’m a lady”

I don’t remember ever hacking Silver off… You’re not my ex-wife are you??

Cheez0, hearing is on Friday morning but not heard any more from the opposition yet. Had an informal chat with my property lawyer last night, she said their “drop hands” letter is perfectly standard, and they’ve done it so that “if” I lose, they can say to the judge that I ignored their legal advice and continued to go to court. If I “was” to lose, then that could be deemed unreasonable in comparison to their lovely, thoughtful and public spirited behaviour.

I’m 100% confident that they ballsed up, and I’m 100% confident that I can present my case in such a way that no judge would say I’m liable for all of the bill owed. I think it’s just a matter of letting them decide.

Fingers crossed I get a judge that has a grudge against sharks in pin-striped suits giving the whole legal system a bad name…

Update:

Well, attended court on Friday, the firm that was suing me sent a litigator rather than the solicitor that had screwed up. He asked if I was prepared to settle rather than going into the court, I told him I had a strong defence and was prepared to let a judge decide the outcome.

Then he produced a list of their costs in preparing their case – basically a cost schedule for 2 solicitors, so just short of £2 grand’s worth of work – and told me they’d be pushing for full costs. I said “erm… this is small claims track isn’t it? You’re only entitled to fixed costs for attending the hearing aren’t you? So shall we pop this in this wastepaper basket where it belongs?” The look on his face was priceless!

Waited for 2hrs and then the judge called everyone waiting into the courtroom. He said that due to a particularly busy schedule, most cases would be adjourned but we’d probably have to wait all day to find out.

So, the litigator goes and makes some phonecalls, comes back to me and says they’d settle for half the bill. I told him no, and explained that the most I had to lose was a couple of grand, but if judgement went in my favour, I’d be instructing a solicitor to sue them for professional negligence, so his firm had potentially a lot more to lose than me.

I explained that I would rather not lose another day’s pay to attend court again, so I’d make a contribution of £200 towards the court costs, dispersments etc, but it was to go on record that it was towards costs and not the invoices.

He pulled his face and told me it was an “unattractive offer”, but I told him that to pay any more would be contributing to the invoiced totals, and I wasn’t prepared to do that on principal.

He accepted and drew up a consent order there and then. So, I got the afternoon off to drive down to Surrey to watch the Olympic road race!

I think it was a moral victory of sorts, all I was fighting for was for the “debt” to be written off, but another day in court would have resulted in another day’s lost earnings.

Only problem I now face is that in my mind, I have a couple of extra grand in the bike fund pot!!!

Thanks again for all the advice, it wasn’t half as daunting as I thought.

😀

Good result, well except for the road race that is.

Well played, good sir. Well played indeed.

Well done – good result!
Honest reasoning defeats the usual litigator’s confidence – as you noted, they had a lot more to lose if the Tribunal took your side fully; £200 allows a small degree of face-saving (but not the costs of the day).

(ex-lawyer – saw the light)

well done!

Cheers, I’m glad I took the pragmatic approach – it could have gone either way in a hearing because no matter how morally “right” I was, there’s always the issue that the judge will have been a former solicitor or barrister and might have a grudge against people contesting fees.

I told the litigator that my principals wouldn’t allow me to increase my offer as it would make me feel that I was contributing to the invoices. He scoffed and said “Oh pleeeeeeease, don’t talk about principals…”

I said “well, you’re a solicitor, you don’t have principals but I’m just an ordinary bloke that’s been dicked about by his solicitor!”

That made him laugh and kind of diffused things a little. I left the court with him and walked through the town having a chat and he seemed like a really nice fella, maybe they’re not all complete ****s!

And yes, shame about the road race result… But on the flip side, I’m thinking an S-Works SL4 with Dura-Ace would look lovely in my bike cave… 😉

Well done 😉

Good work that sounds like a result.

Just remember that the litigators are just “hired guns”. I used to travel back to town from the County Courts chatting with the opposing Counsel with whom I’d been snarling/mocking/arguing 10 minutes earlier.

As an SL3 owner, deffo go with your plan…

Congrats – good result there!

They’ll play hardball, just like you did. But in the end, they are just human and respect a bit of banter/barter.

“result in your favour, stand on the moral high ground and take a bow”

He said I was very brave to take on a law firm, and actually said he thought I handled things very well. But I’ll never know how confident he was – I suspect he must have known it really could have gone either way.

He did suggest I should try and stay out of the courts in future, I suggested that it might be better for me to stay out of churches… 😀

Great result.

An excellent result indeed! Chapeau! 😀

hats off to you, sir, i’ve been following this thread, it seems that you deserve a new bike….or drugs and hookers 🙂

I think I’ll stick with the new bike plan… It was women that got me into this mess, and drugs don’t agree with me. 😉

Great result 🙂

He said I was very brave to take on a law firm, and actually said he thought I handled things very well. But I’ll never know how confident he was – I suspect he must have known it really could have gone either way.

They clearly didn’t have a leg to stand on. If they thought they had a glimmer of hope you wouldn’t have walked away from refusing to paying their bill so easily. It was their action. I’m not suggesting that you’re not an awesome litigator, but if there was any sort of case in there at all, the guy who just settled for £200 would be out of a job by the time he got back to the office.

Did you actually suffer any loss as a result of their negligent services (i’m assuming you must have otherwise the solicitor wouldn’t be worried about a neg claim against them)? Presumably you’ll still pursue your own action for that loss then?

good result 🙂

Did you actually suffer any loss as a result of their negligent services (i’m assuming you must have otherwise the solicitor wouldn’t be worried about a neg claim against them)? Presumably you’ll still pursue your own action for that loss then?

I argued that the divorce dragged on for 6 months after it should have been settled and that all negotiations after the initial Form E’s etc was rendered useless because I was forced to renegotiate in person.

He said I would be asked by the judge to quantify my losses (which I knew), so I listed the time I’d had to spend researching and corresponding with the opposition, my lost earnings, and said I hoped the judge would decide how much of the monies already spent should be brought into question (about £10 grand)…

The crux of their argument was that as I’d managed to achieve pretty much the same outcome as originally proposed, I’d not actually lost out. My argument was that I could have saved a shedload of money if I’d done it myself from the outset!