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Scott Benton: Hey everyone, it’s Scott Benton. I’m the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast. How are you? We are a podcast dedicated towards showing you how easy it is to transition from being a law student into your professional career as an attorney. And we’re going to show you that practicing law is actually fun and engaging.
It’s going to be a fun transition for you to begin your legal career as an attorney that you’ve worked so hard for and you finally passed the bar and got your bar ticket.
Scott Benton: Today’s question that we are going to answer is what does it mean to waive notice? What does it mean to waive notice? But before we answer that question, we got to set the table a little bit.
Go back now. Maybe you know what notice is, but we’re gonna define notice so that we can talk about what it means to waive notice. So [00:01:00] let’s take a look at what notices now. First of all, if you’re in a hearing or you’re whether that’s on a Zoom call or it’s in an actual courtroom, that hearing will eventually conclude, and it is part of the court clerk’s responsibility to generate and distribute to all interested parties what’s called a notice.
Now, the notice will have typically, the judges decisions or findings on it. Something that sort of wraps up and concludes the nature of that hearing that you’ve just been in. Now, at the very least, it’ll have a continuation date on it. Maybe nothing’s been decided yet. So the Court clerk wouldn’t include a decision on a notice, but they would indicate anything that’s important that needs to be communicated along with the continuation date, and then that would be sent out. So that’s what a notice is.
And we’re going to talk about waiving notice. Now, [00:02:00] one question for the sake of this discussion that we want to cover real quickly is whether or not the court clerk actually wants to create this notice at the end of a case. Now, keep in mind that there are cases pretty much typically going on all day long in a courthouse and in a particular judge’s courtroom.
So by the end of the day, that court clerk is probably going to have several of these notices that need to be completed and distributed. So, does that court clerk actually want to do the work of sending out this notice. And the answer is absolutely not. No, they do not want to do the work to send out this notice.
So we have a really interesting situation here, which we’re going to get into. Now, when it comes to this notice, the judge actually has another option that they can exercise. And that is where we get into the [00:03:00] idea of waiving notice. So what does that mean? Now a courtroom on a case or hearing is required to publish this notice, but they can also choose if everyone agrees to waive notice to not put this notice together.
So everything is, you know, is captured on the transcript, any information that you need, even if it’s a conclusion and it’s a finding and there’s something in that, where you need to go and reference what the judge decided or even the continuation date. You can always comb through the transcript if you want to find that information, but this notice, if it’s written properly and there are no mistakes on it, it’s a much easier document to go to find that information because It’s all consolidated.
I mean, that’s what a notice is really there to provide for everybody who’s a part of this case. But the judge can choose to waive the notice, but [00:04:00] the judge has to get a consensus. Every single attorney must agree to waive notice. So, what the judge will start to do is ask every single attorney, do you agree Provide this court permission to waive notice.
The attorneys, one after another, will say, yes, we provide our permission to waive notice. And if they get all of the attorneys to waive notice, then that notice can be waived. And that means the court clerk is going to be a little bit happier because instead of doing, let’s say, five notices or 10 notices that day, they only have to do four or nine notices as the case may be.
So that’s one less notice that they have to put together, and send out at the end of that hearing. So, there is an option here to do the notice or not to do the notice. Now this is where your opportunity comes in. This is where you have a chance to really build a relationship, not just with the judge, but with the [00:05:00] entire courtroom staff, as you soon shall see.
But before we get there, I want to just sort of go through a little story to kind of illustrate what your opportunity is. And the story is that in a case, at the end of a case, the judge, instead of asking the courtroom clerk to complete the notice, the judge asked one of the attorneys to complete the notice and the attorney let the judge know that was not their responsibility and reminded the judge that notices are put together by the court clerk.
Now, before the judge could respond, the opposing attorney stood up and volunteered to put that notice together, just stood up and volunteered. And the first attorney got very quiet, because the first attorney realized that they had made a mistake and the second attorney volunteered to put together the notice so the courtroom clerk didn’t have to do it [00:06:00] and the judge immediately brightened up and smiled and was very happy and said, of course, yes, thank you.
Thank you. You can put the notice together and make sure that gets distributed. So the second attorney, in a sense, won the day because from that point forward, the judge was very grateful to the second attorney, the courtroom staff drew that attorney’s name and everybody in that room, except maybe for the first attorney, was very grateful for the second attorney, because it lessens the burden of work that the courtroom clerk has to put together, certainly.
And on behalf of that courtroom clerk, the judge thanked that attorney for taking on that work and getting that notice out. Now, similarly, you have the exact same opportunity. So, in a hearing, in a trial, at the end of the day, or at the end of the case, you may be in a similar situation where the judge decides that they would like to waive this notice.
And so the judge is going around to all the [00:07:00] attorneys and do you agree to waive the notice? But you don’t want to be that person that agrees to waive the notice. You don’t want to be that person. You don’t want to essentially be that first attorney who gets very quiet and realizes the mistake they made.
Instead, you want to be the person who volunteers to put together the notice and distribute the notice in other words, you don’t want to waive the notice at all. You want to be the person to do the work, why? Because it builds goodwill with the court it builds goodwill with the courtroom staff. You are lessening the work they have to do But also it’s also going to benefit you as well in your case because a lot of times there are notices that are being put together by the courtroom staff by the court clerk And there’s so many of them, or they’re really busy, and just by virtue of the pressure that’s on them, mistakes get made.
This is your opportunity to make sure that everything on that notice is written correctly. And [00:08:00] that there are no mistakes. You can really put that together and control that a little bit more. So that you have the information that you need as you need it for your case and for your client. And that’s what gets sent out.
So, it helps you, it helps the court clerk, it helps the judge. It just breeds goodwill all around for everybody. So don’t be that person that waives notice, that agrees to waive notice. Be that person that volunteers.
Now, we have one of the attorneys that works at the firm that I work for, and he relayed a story to us where he took this advice, because at our firm we talk about this, we talk about don’t waive notices don’t participate in that, instead of volunteer to complete the notices.
And this attorney, took that advice to heart, had never done anything like that before, had never even really heard of this. And when that moment came up where the judge was asking to waive notice, this attorney in our firm stood up and volunteered to write the [00:09:00] notice. And the judge kind of looked up, it was on Zoom.
This attorney told us the story the other day. The hearing was on Zoom and the judge stopped and kind of looked up at this attorney on this on the Zoom camera and smiled and brightened up and said, thank you, counselor. Thank you. Yes, of course, you can put together the notice.
Thank you so much for doing that. And our attorney couldn’t believe the and see, here’s the thing. They never forgot his name from that point forward. They always remembered him because of that gesture of goodwill. And that’s exactly the type of response that you want to give the court. It’s going to generate all kinds of positive feedback loop that’s gonna come back to you, and then you’ll have the information that you need.
You know for sure conclusively that you’re gonna have all of the information you need to move your case along. You won’t have to go back to the transcript, you won’t have to sort of fish around for any of the information that you need. It’ll be right there and you’ll know that because you’re the one that put it together.
So there’s a lot of thankfulness, gratitude that’s gonna come out, and [00:10:00] it really sort of becomes a shortcut to finding any of the necessary information you need for your case. So, the tip, is never, ever waive notice. Always be that person that volunteers to put that notice together.
So I hope that’s been helpful. I am Scott Benton and I’m the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast. And if you like this material that you’re being presented and you want to receive an alert, every time we put out a new podcast episode, you can go to our website. Our website is Classroom2Courtroom. com.
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We hope to see you on the next episode of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast. And until then we hope you’ll join us in making the world a better place, one [00:11:00] client at a time. Thank you so much and take care.
