Page 32 - The Circle of Life

Sometimes this starts what we call a paper war and enriches the lawyers

involved.

We will not be bothering ourselves with criminal cases in this book for your

problem is purely in private law. Your ex may try to involve the criminal side of
things by laying a criminal charge against you for bringing back the children

later than agreed or whatever else they can think off. My advice is once it
becomes criminal getting yourself professional assistance and you can do so on

the State's costs with Public Defenders etc. (We call it pro deo work.)

Let us look at the processes in general which is followed in private cases

This just an overview for it is impossible to teach you how to become a trial

lawyer without years of training and you need a killer instinct which may not be
natural to you. When I started the book I thought of going in great detail into

the civil procedure act and explain exactly how to defend yourself but I realised
that would be impossible given the variances of factors in each individual case. It

comes with experience only.

First point is you don't need a lawyer and are allowed by law to represent
yourself. However there is a saying in law that a lawyer representing himself has

a fool for a client. Thus you really should get professionals involved if you can
afford to do so. Otherwise look at the local law schools that do a lot of pro amico

work.

The agreeable thing about being a non-lawyer defending his rights is that the
court does treat you with much more sympathy if your pleadings are not 100%
correct. Remember here there are always three parties involved with pleadings.

You are the first one. Your soon to be ex is number two and the court who

issued the summons is number three. All original papers always go to the court
file for evidential reasons. How do you do that? Very simple! You deliver all three

documents first to your soon to be ex on the address of their lawyers given in
the summons and they sign for all three documents and keep one copy. The

original goes to the registrar of the court who signs for it and on your copy. Sign
means to stamp it with the official stamp writing the date and time on as well.

You keep your signed copy. This is called service of pleadings and the pet hate of

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