DELAY WITH COURT ORDERS

One of the great frustrations in a solicitor’s job is trying to get court orders and judgements. This is particularly relevant in the High Court. The position in the High Court is that if you wish to appeal a High Court decision to the Supreme Court, you must do so within 21 days of the order being perfected. 

The problem is that you could have a relatively straightforward case which ends in one day, say June 1st, but the judge decides to reserve his judgement. As in every other area of life, some judges are efficient but some are not. Some judges will have their reserved judgement ready in a couple of weeks but the unfortunate position is that you could be waiting over a year for other judges. Waiting for the judgement can be frustrating in the extreme but even when you get your judgement, you are still not ready to lodge an appeal if you wish to appeal. Once you get the judgement, the Order itself then has to be perfected and that process can take several months. This should not happen but it certainly does happen. 

I have recently received instructions in relation to a family law case where the judge at the end of the hearing gave a verbal decision, but said that he would set out his thinking in a written judgement and it took a full year for that judgement to come through and then took another six months to get the perfected order. This is particularly critical in the High Court because once your appeal is lodged, books of pleadings and a certificate of readiness has to be sent to the Supreme Court and only then does time start running in the Supreme Court and at the moment the delay bringing cases on for hearing is around four years. In this particular unfortunate lady’s case involving substantial matters of family law, there could be a delay of six extraordinary years before there is a final hearing and matters are brought to a close. 

I have taken over cases where the other side lodge an appeal from the Circuit to the High Court and the case sits in limbo because the appellant did not lodge a book of papers so that the case could appear in a list to fix a date for hearing. 

The unfortunate situation exists in Ireland that if somebody knows how the system works, they can delay bringing a case to a conclusion literally for years on end unless your solicitor is proactive and aggressively fights your corner. In many of these cases the only alternative is to make an absolute pest of yourself by ringing the relevant court registrar or bringing applications to court to make sure the other side lodge necessary papers. 

They say justice delayed is justice denied. All I can say is if your solicitor knows what is happening, there is always something you can do about it but if you do nothing, nothing happens.

Kevin Brophy,

Brophy Solicitors