JUDICIAL RESCUE SERVICES: WHEN THE APPEAL BECOMES THE NEXT OBSTACLE 🔹I’ve written before about what I call Ireland’s judicial rescue services - the troubling use of procedural mechanisms that can prevent serious allegations from ever receiving substantive judicial examination. 🔹But lay litigants should be alert to another practice. 🔹The attribution of concessions in responses to Notices of Appeal that the appellant never actually made. 🔹Imagine appealing a High Court decision only to discover that the respondents have filed a document asserting that you “expressly accepted” or “implicitly conceded” matters you have consistently disputed. 🔹Those supposed concessions are then used to argue that your appeal is unsustainable. 🔹A carefully qualified legal argument becomes an admission. 🔹A limited acknowledgment is expanded into wholesale acceptance of a judicial conclusion. 🔹And suddenly, instead of answering the actual grounds of appeal, the respondents are defending a version of the appeal that the appellant never brought. 🔹How convenient for anyone hoping that a questionable High Court decision will escape appellate scrutiny. 🔹It raises an obvious concern: could the same interests that benefited from a favourable procedural ruling in the High Court then seek to protect that outcome by mischaracterising the appellant’s case before the Court of Appeal? 🔹That is a question worth asking, not a conclusion to be presumed. WHAT CAN LAY LITIGANTS DO? 🔎 Demand the exact words. If respondents allege an express concession, insist they identify precisely where it appears. 🔎 Compare the documents line by line. Highlight what you actually pleaded against what the respondents claim you conceded. 🔎 Challenge selective quotation. A qualification omitted from a sentence can completely reverse its meaning. 🔎 Request correction in writing. Give the opposing solicitors an opportunity to explain or withdraw the mischaracterisation. Preserve the correspondence. 🔎 Bring the discrepancy before the Court properly. Address it in permitted submissions or seek procedural directions where necessary. 🔎 Consider professional accountability. Knowingly misleading a court is not legitimate advocacy. Where the evidence supports it, consider a complaint to the appropriate regulator. @LSRAIreland 🔹What I find particularly exasperating is the prospect of lay litigants being forced to spend yet more time and money defending themselves against supposed admissions they never made. 🔹The appeal process exists to scrutinise decisions of lower courts. It should not become another exercise in obscuring the issues through elaborate legal drafting. 🔹My advice to every lay litigant: scrutinise the respondents’ documents as carefully as you scrutinise the judgment you’re appealing. 🔹Sometimes the first battle on appeal is simply ensuring that the Court is told the truth about what you actually said. #AccessToJustice #LayLitigants #JudicialAccountability #Ireland