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Dear clients and cooperation partners,
On 4 August 2011, the parliament adopted amendments to the Civil Procedure Law at the third reading. The aim is to decrease court workloads, ensuring cases are reviewed by courts much sooner.
In amending the Civil Procedure Law the legislator has decided that courts will not be responsible for reviewing cases of two categories that previously formed a significant part of their workload. These cases are about undisputed compulsory execution of liabilities and compulsory execution of liabilities under warning procedures.
In cases on undisputed compulsory execution of liabilities, creditors mostly wish to obtain satisfaction of claims secured by mortgages or commercial pledges or performance of monetary obligations substantiated by notarial agreements on payment of funds or promissory notes.
In cases on execution of liabilities under warning procedures, creditors try to achieve performance of various other payment obligations, which succeeds if the debtor admits the existence of the debt.
Many Latvian businesses are familiar with these debt collection procedures in one way or another.
It is notable that courts of first instance reviewed 120,000 civil cases in 2010. Of these, 74,000 or 62% were cases related to undisputed compulsory execution of liabilities and cases on compulsory execution of liabilities under warning procedures. This is according to analysis of court statistics 2010/2009 prepared by the state Court Administration agency.
Although cases in this category are not reviewed at a court hearing and processing them is partially technical and laws set short deadlines for their review, nevertheless the huge number of these cases causes an immense workload for courts, preventing them from reviewing those cases that should be processed under the general procedure.
For these reasons the legislator has decided that as of 1 January 2012 cases of both mentioned categories will be reviewed by land book departments that were previously more associated with registration of title to immovable properties.
The courts will still review applications in cases on undisputed compulsory execution of liabilities and on compulsory execution of liabilities under warning procedures submitted to courts until 31 December 2011.
These amendments to the Civil Procedure Law can reasonably be expected to even the workload between land book departments and courts, thus facilitating faster review of other cases by courts.
The sole temporary disadvantage of this innovation could be the possibility that land book judges who now are going to review creditors’ applications for undisputed and warning procedures might need some time to study opinions established so far by case law in relation to deciding the issues in undisputed and warning procedures. Let us hope that this can be done by 1 January 2012. |
