Legal Porn

I went to the court today, still wondering if the solicitor would be there (no contact since December 24th) but I couldn’t bring myself to be the one who emailed since he has to be professional enough to do that if necessary. We had our prior arrangements and unless I hear otherwise I always stick to those.

Met the Salvation Army person outside the court at 2:45pm who’d arranged to come on her day off for moral support (and out of interest). Went inside and through the security check and the security guard confiscated my pen knife from my key ring. I’d gone with minimal possessions but my mind no longer distinguishes the pen knife from the key ring, and it’s an incredibly useful place to keep the pen knife (Swiss Army knife).

My advice is that they don’t take too kindly at a court when you turn up with a knife 😅 and it created an additional hassle whereby they had to inform me of a procedure I need to follow to get it back. Wow what a great start, turning up to a court hearing to defend my case and taking a knife 😬. I continue to cycle through all possible life experiences. You don’t want to see what stuff I’ve tried to board planes with, haha.

We were directed to the third floor and upon arriving there my solicitor appeared!!! By this time it was already 3:15pm with the hearing at 3:30pm (having lost the extra time in security) but thankfully the solicitor chose to do our case second (they double-book) and we ended up with plenty of time to have a meeting before the hearing.

It turned out my solicitor had tried to email me last Friday but received a bounce-back email on Saturday, then tried again on Sunday and he received the second bounce-back during our meeting there 😆. It turned out my domain expired last Wednesday (I thought I’d set it to autorenew) 🤦‍♂️. Always complications…another mystery solved, but luckily no harm done as I’d brought everything I needed with me.

Now after three months of Forensic Files, sitting through the Derek Chauvin trial last year and recent Djokovic boring civil hearing saga, I’ve lately learned an awful lot in outline about how these legal things work, so walking into a mini-court room in my brand new shirt and trousers was sheer justice/legal porn. Like one of those nerds who finally has the chance to live their dream and demonstrate their armchair expertise. The court room had a good amount of shiny wood panelling which is what you expect.

The landlord and his representative took the two right-hand chairs in a line of four and the solicitor motioned for me to sit in the second-from-left. Considering how I’ve had to construct a literal fort to evade the landlord this past year it was quite uneasy to contemplate sitting within two chairs of him.

We did introductions and it turned out that the landlord’s legal representative was his wife who did all the paperwork 😂 (my solicitor told me afterwards that he’d had exactly the same mental reaction).

Our 15 minute hearing turned into 45 minutes. Our position was that the eviction claim was defective since the landlord hadn’t served the correct version of an important legal information booklet (How To Rent). My solicitor did great.

The landlord’s position came down to the fact that the council had assured the landlord that the council would serve me these documents— since it was the council’s Rent Guarantee Scheme which initially housed me here. The initial paperwork was collected by me at the council’s office at the start of the tenancy. On multiple occasions during the hearing the landlord and his wife took a while to understand certain questions and lines of reasoning, and faffed around a bit. They didn’t really get that they couldn’t just phone up the council during the hearing or bring in new evidence out of nowhere.

In the end the judge had to request for the landlord to get a witness statement from the council to the effect that the required up-to-date documents were served to me by the date of the initial eviction notice, and will adjourn another hearing at the earliest date after February 14th 😯. It will be interesting to see what comes of that, and what the legal implications are if the council messed up in this situation.

This is already a victory for me since I am just buying time for Launchpad to house me and I’ve probably bought another 6 weeks today, in addition to all of the time since October 4th (initial eviction deadline). The solicitor thinks I am still in a good position. My decision to fill out that defence form at the end of September is still being vindicated :).

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My review rating for Civil Hearing: 3/5.

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