Debt Recovery Series No. 4 – Issuing a Claim
This is the continuation of the debt recovery mini-series. Please see previous article here....
Back to News and EventsThis is the continuation of the debt recovery mini-series. Please see previous article here....
Back to News and EventsThis is the continuation of the debt recovery mini-series. Please see previous article here.
If after sending a letter before action, the debt is still not paid, you may want to think about starting court proceedings. This is also called ‘ issuing a claim ’.
This involves sending a pack of specific documents to the court along with a court fee. This pack will include:
Upon receiving this pack, the court will ‘issue’ the documents. The Court will provide a Notice of Issue confirming the date when the proceedings were commenced.
You should decide whether you wish to serve the claim on the debtor yourself or whether you would like the court to do so. The Court will do this for you unless you expressly ask them not to. You may want to do it if, for example, you know the Defendant will be awkward about whether he receives the papers or you may want to tactically serve in a few weeks rather than straight away.
A response pack is provided to the debtor at the time of serving the Claim Form and Particulars of Claim. This sets out a number of ways the debtor can deal with your claim.
If the court serves the claim, they will include within the Notice of Issue the date the debtor was served. The Notice of Issue will also state the deadline date the debtor should have responded by.
If you have done it yourself (or your solicitor has done it on your behalf), a Certificate of Service must be filed at court to confirm service. You will then need to work out the Defendant’s time to respond.
The debtor has 14 days to respond to your Claim. They can
If they do not respond at all, you can apply to the Court for a Default Judgment.
We will consider each of these possible responses in turn in the next article in the series.