Pi v Zhou

HIS HONOUR: By his statement of claim filed on 20 May 2015 the plaintiff seeks damages, as well as aggravated and exemplary damages, from the defendants under several categories of claim. These include nuisance, illegal eviction, assault and battery, property damage, trespass to goods, malicious falsehood and personal injury. Although it is not a universally reliable guide to the quality of the pleadings, I note that the statement of claim is more than 25 pages long.

Doing the best that I can, the several claims made by the plaintiff appear to have been generated by events that occurred in or about January 2011. In this last respect I also note that the plaintiff has commenced other proceedings, with which I dealt on 27 March 2015: see Pi v State of New South Wales [2015] NSWSC 324. Those proceedings are also concerned with an altercation on 12 January 2011 at premises known as 21 Moreton Street, Lakemba. That address also figures prominently in the events described by the plaintiff in the statement of claim in these proceedings.

The present proceedings recently came before McCallum J on 22 April 2015 on the application of the defendants to set aside a default judgment and other relief. Her Honour dealt with the application to set aside the default judgment but was unable in the time available to dispose of all issues: see Pi v Zhou [2015] NSWSC 470. The proceedings then came before me on 11 June 2015 for the purpose of dealing with the balance of the defendants’ notice of motion filed 4 March 2015. For presently relevant purposes, that motion sought the following orders:

Having heard the parties, I indicated that I was proposing to make the following orders:

I indicated to the parties that I would provide reasons for my decision as soon as possible. Those reasons are as follows.

The statement of claim is a difficult document to comprehend. It is discursive, unstructured, clearly not prepared by or with the assistance of anyone with legal training and uses language that suggests its author’s first language is not English. The document is patently embarrassing and fails in any acceptable or reasonable way to formulate or plead a cause of action known to the law. It is prolix and confusing and not something to which any defendant could be expected to respond.

When dealing with the plaintiff’s other proceedings, and the defendant’s application to strike out his statement of claim, I said this at [11]:

It seems to me that I should cautiously adopt the same approach in these proceedings. The plaintiff’s statement of claim is definitively embarrassing, fails conspicuously to disclose any reasonable cause of action known to the law and is a document to which the defendants could not, and ought not to be required, to respond. In dealing with the plaintiff’s statement of claim in the other proceedings I said that it was

Those comments apply with equal force to the statement of claim in these proceedings.

I will give consideration to any proposed amendment to the statement of claim that the plaintiff wishes to propound when next the matter comes before me on 9 July 2015. I should indicate that I will treat the defendants’ application for orders with respect to the original statement of claim as applying to any proposed amended statement of claim that the plaintiff may wish to propound if I am asked to do so. That will obviate the need to file an amended notice of motion with attendant costs and seems to me to accord with the spirit and intent of the Civil Procedure Act 2005 and the overriding purpose of the just, quick and cheap disposition of litigation.