The courts claim they didn't get our email.. CCJ

proformance

Hi guys 

A customer claimed against us under the grounds an item we had sold was not fit for purpose.

We put together an extremely thorough and well organised defence and followed all the instructions to submit it to the County Court, following all the instruction we had.

30 days goes by and we receive a letter stating that the court had sided with the customer as we did not present our defence in time.

However, we very much DID respond with our defence and our mail handling / CRM system that handles our mail has confirmed this by way of email logs.

These logs show that the email was successfully sent from ours (their) servers but queued on the court's mail servers. 

I'm sure there are a multitude of different reasons for why this happened, but I don't see any of those reasons as our responsibility and I'm frustrated with the court system in this instance. 

No company or individual that we have ever communicated has made us aware of not having received an email from ua
In other words we've never previously experienced this. 

Can anyone please advise. Has this happened to anyone before? I'd find it hard to believe we're the first.. 

Thanks 

Z 

Mistral001

I have not come across this.  I would look into appealing the finding if you have not done this already.

Sandtree

Mistral001 said:

I have not come across this.  I would look into appealing the finding if you have not done this already.

Doesnt it count as a default judgement and therefore its a case of asking the judgement to be set aside rather than appealing?

proformance

As it is understood by us, we lost the case by default as no defence was ever submitted (in the court's view) and so we would have had a CCJ against us unless we either a) appealed or b) refunded the customer.

Trading waters new, we begrudgingly decided to bite the bullet and refund the customer. Given we couldn't even successfully submit evidence to the court in a defence, we didn't fancy tangling with the appear process....

But it really has left us with a bitter taste as well as totally unjustified hole in our cash flow, which we may never recover from. 

Too many scammer out there - I think the judicial system on these claim procedures should be rebalanced. 

tacpot12

It's not uncommon for emails, especially those with attachments, to get held up by the firewalls and security systems that protect organisations for spam emails. However, the courts email service should be used to receiving large attachments and anything that was held up should have been reviewed propmptly. 

Did the litigant start their claim using the Money Claim Online Service? If so, you should have been able to upload your defence rather than emailing it.

Did you send a copy of your defence to the litigant and did they receive it? If you didn't send them a copy, the court might just decide that their decision stands becuase you didn't for the Civil Procedure Rules.  

Ultimately, you need to ask the court to set aside the judgement, on the basis of the error of their processing systems. If they won't do so for free, you may need to pay the fee to request a set-aside or decide the take the matter further by first complaining to HMCTS, and then to your MP who can ask that your complaint is referred to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman.

It's not clear whether the court has now agreed that they have received your email. This is really the first hurdle, gettind them to agree that they received it and confirming the date that it was received. You will need this evidence to complain about it, but once you have this, you should ask the court to set-aside the judgement at no cost to yourself. 

proformance

tacpot12 said:

It's not uncommon for emails, especially those with attachments, to get held up by the firewalls and security systems that protect organisations for spam emails. However, the courts email service should be used to receiving large attachments and anything that was held up should have been reviewed propmptly. 

Did the litigant start their claim using the Money Claim Online Service? If so, you should have been able to upload your defence rather than emailing it.

Did you send a copy of your defence to the litigant and did they receive it? If you didn't send them a copy, the court might just decide that their decision stands becuase you didn't for the Civil Procedure Rules.  

Ultimately, you need to ask the court to set aside the judgement, on the basis of the error of their processing systems. If they won't do so for free, you may need to pay the fee to request a set-aside or decide the take the matter further by first complaining to HMCTS, and then to your MP who can ask that your complaint is referred to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman.

It's not clear whether the court has now agreed that they have received your email. This is really the first hurdle, gettind them to agree that they received it and confirming the date that it was received. You will need this evidence to complain about it, but once you have this, you should ask the court to set-aside the judgement at no cost to yourself. 

Thanks for your reply.

We only ever received notice from the courts themselves so I assume the litigant did not use the Money Claim Online service 

No, we did not send anything directly to the litigant in terms of our defence, as we were never instructed to do so by the courts. 

The courts have said that they have NOT received our emails and that there is nothing they can do and their ruling is final (unless we want to appeal) 

MalMonroe

I haven't experienced this even though I did have quite a bit of communication with my local court when I was involved in an Employment Tribunal a few years ago. I always received an immediate auto-acknowledgement of receipt from the court though. If I hadn't, I would have phoned to alert them to the fact that I'd sent important information.

You could take a screenshot of the email you sent and send a copy of that with a covering letter, including a complaint of their mishandling of your case, to the court. 

Or just forward the email you originally sent to the court, with a covering note on the new email, or both. And also, your complaint! Which should definitely be made, since it obviously wasn't your fault.

It's easy to prove that you did respond. But for any future correspondence with courts, I'd definitely chase to ensure that it's been received. Especially if you don't receive their auto-acknowledgement.

proformance

Perhaps just a lesson learned, but I'd like to know everyone's thoughts then... Even though we specified we'd refund the customer (and promptly did so), what can we expect to gain from raising an official complaint and ensuring they read over our defense?

By the way, they did receive our defense as we sent it from our Gmail directly after we found out their ruling - but alas, we were adjudged to have been out of time so they said a judge wouldn't have even gone through it thereafter.