Summons: what you need to do

[Citizen X]

Hi there,
I’m terribly sorry for the late reply! The ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,’ really!
1. Fortunately, you do have recourse to the law and there are remedies alternatively defences that you can successfully raise in court;
2. I’m going to start with the end result of this process, the worst case scenario if you will! Default judgment or even judgement where you do appear but cannot raise an acceptable defence!
3. You need to avoid this at all costs!
4. The idea is that you will get a legal aid board attorney failing which a university law clinic attorney at a later stage, but you need to act now by doing 2 important things;
5. I suspect you received a combined summons? You need to file the notice of intention to defend with the plaintiff and clerk of courts within 10 days of the date of summons having been served, you then have 20 days from the date on which summons has been served to file your plea, in your case, it’s a plea that includes 2 sections, your special plea and then your normal plea. Extinctive prescription can be used as a special plea for third party road accident fund claims. This depends largely on what we call, ‘ civilian method of calculating time,’ Interpretation Act. So it depends on when the accident took place;
6. You can also defend the action and submit a normal plea as it were, I’ll state and confirm this for the record, when people are involved in an accident, they don’t really know where to look for the relevant law, they most often try and google the insurance act, and it won’t help you even slightly, what will help you however is the law of delict( delictual liability) and the apportionment of damages act.If you go this route, you still need a plea, and your argument will in essence be that according to the reasonable person concept of law, you were not negligent and therefore not liable and that the other party was. This needs to be specifically pleaded in a very specific way;
7. Just a small note on negligence, in both criminal law and delict, fault is an essential requirement, now fault itself has 2 components, Intention(dolus) and Culpa(negligence). In delictual liability, it’s culpa(negligence) that is required to find you liable and the test remains the reasonable person test. The reasonable person is merely a fictitious character that the law invents to personify the objective standard of reasonable conduct that the law sets in order to determine negligence.