Electronic communication and filing of documents in the civil claims process

Can I file a document by fax?

You may file a document by sending it by fax; however this facility should only be used in an unavoidable emergency and must not be used to file letters and documents of a routine or non-urgent nature or a document which attracts a filing fee.

If you file a document by fax, please do not send the original document to the court too.

The time of delivery of a faxed document shall be the time it is delivered to the court fax machine regardless of the time shown as transmitted on the sending machine. If a fax is received by the court after 4pm it shall be treated as though it had been received at 9am on the next day that the court is open.

If a fax relates to a hearing, the date and time of the hearing must be prominently displayed on the fax.

Can I file a document by email?

You may file a document by sending it by email however this facility must not be used to take any step in a claim which attracts a fee.

Do not send emails directly to the judge as they will not be treated as being received.

If you file a document by email, please do not send the original document to the court too.

When filing a form by email the following must be adhered to:-

• all email messages must contain the name, telephone number and email address of the sender;
• where proceedings have already begun, the subject line of an email sent to the court must contain the following information:-
  • case number;
  • parties names (abbreviated if necessary);
  • time and date of any hearing to which the email relates.
• correspondence and documents may be sent as either text in the body of the email or as an attachment;
• documents required to be in a prescribed form must be sent in that prescribed form as an attachment;
• attachments must be sent in one of the following formats:-
  • Microsoft Word viewer/reader (.doc) in Word 1997 or later format
  • Rich Text Format as (.rtf) files
  • Plain/Formatted Text as (.txt) files
  • Hypertext documents as (.htm) files
  • Adobe Acrobat as (.pdf) files minimum viewer version 4
• attachments received by the court in any other format will be treated as not having been received.
• the size of attachments and the total size of the email must not exceed forty pages in length of normal typescript or 2Mb whichever is the smaller. Documents may not be subdivided to comply with this requirement.
• a document is not filed until the email is received by the court regardless of the time it is shown to have been sent.
• if an email is received by the court after 4pm it shall be treated as though it had been received at 9am on the next day that the court is open.

The court may reply by email where:-

• the response is to a message transmitted electronically;
• the sender has provided an email address.

Can I file a statement of truth electronically?

If you wish to file electronically a document containing a statement of truth you must keep the original document containing the original signature and file with the courts one of the following:-

• the name of the person who signed the statement of truth is typed underneath the statement;
• the person who signed the statement of truth has applied a facsimile of his/her signature in the document by mechanical means; or
• the document that is filed is a scanned version of the document containing the original signature to the statement of truth.