How Long Does It Take To Get My Day In Court?
If you have ever found yourself unlucky enough to have to take someone to court, you will have experienced that urgent feeling of wanting your problem to be fixed, for justice to be done.
But how long does it actually take to get your day in court?
On the 12th May 2022, the courts published its management information tables covering the period from March 2021 to March 2022. These cover case workload as well as the time taken to deal with cases in the tribunals, and in the civil, criminal and family courts.
What do the statistics tell us?
- Most cases are not defended.
- Most of the cases that go all the way to trial are small claims. A small claim is one valued up to £10,000.
- In March 2022, 139,662 claims were issued. This is a decrease of approximately 8.04% from the same month in 2021. Of those claims issue in March 2022, 23,900 were defended.
- The average time taken from a case to get to a small claims hearing or first trial in March 2022 was 50 weeks. It took the same amount of time in 2021.
What does this mean for you?
If you are bringing a claim, these statistics tell us that you have about an 80% chance that your claim will not be defended. This is obviously good news because an undefended claim will be resolved more quickly than if the case goes all the way to trial.
Bear in mind, however, that this does not necessarily mean that you will get exactly what you claimed. Many undefended claims are resolved by a compromise being reached between the parties rather than full payment being made.
If your claim is defended, you can expect it to take nearly a year to get to a first hearing or trial date.
Some points to note about this statistic. The time taken is an average only and therefore some cases will take longer, some less. Also, this is only the time taken to get to a first trial date. Your case may not actually be resolved at that point. There may need to be further hearings to finish the trial, decide how much the loser has to pay, or to decide who pays costs. And if you do win your claim, the defendant may still not pay which means you then have to take enforcement action.
Our experience of how long it takes
In our experience, the Employment Tribunals are taking even longer than a year to get to a final hearing. We have cases ongoing at the moment where it has taken over a year just to get to a preliminary hearing (which is a hearing just to set a timetable for preparing the case for a final hearing).
One of our clients issued a claim in the Employment Tribunal in September 2020 and her final hearing is not scheduled to take place until January 2023.
Why does it take so long?
This is partly due to the process that has to be followed, and partly down to how busy and under-resourced the courts and tribunals are. Every case that goes to court is dealt by following a procedure. The small claims procedure is designed to be quicker and more simplified than the procedure for more complex cases but, as we have seen, even that procedure can take almost a year to get to trial.
More complex or valuable claims can take even longer as there may be a number of hearings before the actual trial, the parties are given longer to do things like prepare statements and their documents, and experts may be involved. They also generally take up more court time so the court diary has to have a space for a longer trial - sometimes several days, sometimes weeks.
Conclusion?
Justice is by no means swift!
If you would like to talk to us about having to go to court or any of the issues above, you can give us a call on 01945 898090 or email Kim Cross at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
