You don’t need to have been in the legal profession very long, to know that the Court Registry often rejects documents for a range of reasons, leading to costs and delays.
As someone who’s been working with legal assistants for more than a decade, I have pooled together three important factors that seem to be the most common culprits leading to rejection.
Your clock is running, so let’s get started with my tips for getting your legal printing to the court on time.
1 – Spelling, Grammar and Typos
Proofread, proofread and proofread again.
A simple spelling error or miswritten date could mean that your documents do not adhere to Court Rules and may be rejected by the Court Registry.
This means everything is postponed and documents resubmitted.
Imagine going to the effort of filing a subpoena, only to discover that your overworked paralegal has misspelt a middle name or written street instead of court on the address line.
Not to mention the cost of this to your law firm, there is also the printing cost considering most documents need to be printed twice, once for the judge and once for the court file.
2 – Ensure Confidentiality
Confidentiality is important.
If you’re a smaller or interstate law firm that does not have the ability to do your own printing you must consider the legal professional privilege of your printer.
Will they sign the necessary confidentiality agreements to ensure that your documents arrive securely to the court registry?
Who is delivering them from the printer to the court registry?
Companies like Print Mint have the necessary industry experience to ensure your documents are signed, sealed and delivered.
3- Allow Time
Allow as much time as possible.
Deadlines are deadlines and if your documents arrive late to the court registry they will not be accepted. This can result in a postponement which means reprinting everything with the correct new dates.
However if you are faced with a seemingly impossible deadline, Print Mint is here to help, they can offer overnight printing and are equipped with high speed document scanning machines.
Maybe the next partner for your firm needs to be a printing partner?
As you can see from the points above, having a trusted printing partner working with you can be a godsend; it can even be a career-saver at times.
Obviously, I’d love you to choose Print Mint as your firm’s printing partner because we take great pride in the trust our current legal clients place in us.
Apart from our confidentiality protocols and experience, we have location on our side. I can’t count how many times our clients have benefited from us being just three minutes from the Federal Court of Australia here in Adelaide.
I’ll let you in on another secret. Because we’re that close, we’re happy to deliver documents to the Federal Court for free, when the job is valued at $250 or more.
It’s likely your firm is close by; we seem to be in the legal firm epicentre of Adelaide! So I’d welcome you to drop in and have a chat, or just email/call so we can explore how we might be able to help you.
Finally, even if you don’t choose Print Mint, I hope the tips above will prove invaluable to you and your clients.
