What is Process Serving and Court Filing?

What is Process Serving and Court Filing? Many have asked the question, “What is Process Serving and Court Filing “? I will try and explain in the simplest form using examples.

It may take time to find a judicial solution if you were wronged in any way and could not reach an adequate solution with the other party to the conflict.

Taking the issue to the court in Mississauga, Brampton, Toronto, or anywhere across Canada may start-up other series of problems i.e. finding a lawyer, paying court fees, handling paperwork, and getting acquainted with all the legal and juridical conditions.

Most important steps in your legal proceeding

“Process serving” and “Court filing” are the two most important steps with which you must be familiar with before the commencement of any legal action in Mississauga.

What is Process Serving and Court Filing?

I will try and explain both in the best way i can. Let us first start with Process Serving.

What is Process Serving?

The legal proceedings in Canada require every party involve in the case to be notified. Especially if the legal action is against them.

Subsequently, Process Serving consists of formally notifying any party of the proceedings involving them, such as: notifying them that a legal action has been brought against them; that they have been summoned to court, etc.

Process service is a significant part of the Due Process of Law (the principle that a person cannot, without appropriate legal proceedings and safeguards, be deprived of life, liberty or property).

Process serving ensures a fair and ongoing legal proceeding as it updates all parties on the status of a process, and what they can or must do about it, throughout the period of its activity.

Importance of process serving 

Process service is needed for numerous reasons, but the main reason is :

  1. To ensure that the due process in Canada is upheld.
  2. To guarantee that legal documents are served in a timely and appropriate manner.

It is, therefore, important to know your city or province legislations regarding the ethics of serving an accused lawfully.

What is Court Filing in Mississauga?

In a layman’s language,  filing in the context of law is the act of presenting a document for immediate consideration, by a court clerk who then stores the files under the file number. A filing fee, which is a part of court costs, is usually paid to a Process Server.

Technically and by definition, Court filing is a rather bureaucratic procedure aiming at monitoring and organizing the case, and maintaining full documentation on request made by each of the parties. It comprises of submitting to the court, every legal documentation concerned with the case for analysis and storage, ensuring that proper lawsuits take place so that it may be applied in court later on.

How Court Filing is done in Mississauga

First, an foremost, Mississauga courthouse deals mostly with Provincial offenses ticket (people go there if they have traffic-related offenses). However,I will still explain how court filing is done generally.  Court filing procedure consists of the duplicate (sometimes triplicate) submission of documents to the court’s clerk. For each document filed, the court clerk inspects the document, ensuring compliance with the court rules, verifies that the filer is not a vexatious litigant (a person who persistently use court proceedings to accomplish any inappropriate objective) and confirms the valid case number and title.

The court clerk, then stamps both copies with a court stamp that indicates the name of the court and the date of the file; keeps one copy for the files of the court and returns one copy to the filer for the filer’s own records (usually called the table of content).

The third copy is, then taken to the chambers, or the courtroom of the judge, who is assigned to the case, by courts which request triplicate submissions. The clerk, then adds the document and any related deadlines or events to the case record.

Is e-filing allowed in Mississauga Courthouse?

The simple answer to that is YES, e-filing is practiced in Canada. You can find more details here. That being said, I can assure you that about 80% of court filing is done at the courthouse not electronically.

It seems to be easy filing electronically, but the procedure is not as easy as it seems. Hence, why people prefer to go to the court to file their Affidavit of Service and other court documents.

Recently, some courts have accepted electronically sent documents, a procedure known as ‘e-filing’.

How to e-file?

To e-file, all you have to do is upload a scanned version in PDF and other information concerning it such as case number and title using the form available here

One of the benefits of e-filing is the fact that, if you can’t physically presenting the legal documents to the court clerk for filing due to reasons such as working hours, illness, distance, etc.  e-filing allow it to be done outside business hours, from anywhere in the world. Even though e-filing makes it easy to file at any time, anywhere, etc, Still a physical copy of the document (called a courtesy copy) must also be provided to the judge on the following working day.

Wrap up

I hope the above explanation answers the question “What is Process Serving and Court Filing”?