Last Saturday I rolled out of bed to get to uni at 9 am. PAIN.
But I had to go because the Law Society was holding a seminar on the new State Supreme Court Rules.
This is a huge event as evidenced by the turnout - normally seminar run by the law society are attended by a relative handful, and most of the attendees would be GDLP (Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice, the certificate one needs to become a Real Lawyer (TM) in South Australia) students who are forced to attend the equivalent of 10 hours of legal seminars to get their certificate. I say “equivalent” of 10 hours because the length of time the seminar runs over does not equate to the actual number of hours actually “counted”. For example a half day seminar that would run for about 4 hours may only count for 2 hours, whereas a mid-week seminar that would run for 2 hours would count for 1.5 hours. Much better to attend the mid-week seminars.
Anyway, this time it was attended by mainly practitioners and they actually used Elder Hall to give the talks! Elder Hall is a very distinguished-looking building, and one of the landmark heritage halls around the University of Adelaide. Somewhat comparable to the nice old hall in HKU whhere they hold all the official events and the exams, but better. HAH.
So what are these court rules you say?
Well when practicing, an important body of knowledge to have is court procedure. This isn’t what could be described as core law in that court procedure functions as a consequence of core law. For example, the law of contract is “core law” - everyone needs to make contracts, contracting is carried out whether or not you go to court or not. It’s only when something stuffs up and you need to bring it to a final legal determination in front of a court that court procedure kicks in.
So the court rules are basically the rules involved when you’re bringing matters to court. They deal with interlocutory applications (the process you go through in bringing the case to trial - eg Defendant hasn’t discovered all documents! Ping him! Or, I need an adjournment of the trial date!) and briefly with the trial process. The rules give the judge the power to deal with the applications brought before him. The rules also cover the procedure involved during the trial.
For example, when you have a dispute that you want to litigate, you have to first write a letter to the other party informing them of the claim against them, and demanding to be paid or else “I’ll sue!”. The rules list in detail the form of the letter, and time limits as to when a response has to be sent, and how long before the claim is lodged in court does the letter have to be sent. The rules also deal with discovery of documents (what to discover, when to discover, procedure involved in seeking further discovery, how to whack the other practitioner on the head if u suspect they are hiding documents from you). As you can see, the rules go into some detail on what steps have to be taken during the process of bringing the case to trial. But they are fairly necessary in that one needs some sort of order around them to be able to quickly and efficiently bring matters to final determination - trial.
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Now the new rules are supposed to be less prescriptive and take a more common sense approach. Actually the substance of the old rules are still there, just numbered differently and maybe rephrased a bit differently, so they say. I only know that it’s a real bitch having to remember where the relevant rule is now in terms of numbering. Also, as many people have pointed out, interrogatories (a list of questions you send to the other side, and they have to answer with reasons) are now called “pre-trial examination by written questions.” >_>
Anyway so that was my very fun Saturday.
When I went back to where my car was parked though, I noticed a couple of possibly plum blossom trees near the back of the University next to the University child care centre. I love these blooms!!