It sounds almost improper the first time clients hear it: a court order obtained without the other side knowing. Yet ex parte applications are a deliberate, policed feature of urgent justice — powerful precisely because the system guards them so hard.
When One Voice Is Justified
Two situations earn the without-notice hearing: where notice would defeat the purpose — the freezing order’s classic logic (warned respondents move money in hours), the evidence about to vanish, the act completed the moment it’s flagged; and where urgency genuinely leaves no time for even abridged notice. The orders granted are correspondingly modest in duration: interim relief holding matters days until the return date, when both sides are heard — the ex parte order is a bridge to contested justice, never a substitute for it. Between the two sits short service: notice abridged rather than absent, the urgent system’s workhorse.
The Duty That Polices It
The price of the empty chair is full and frank disclosure: the applicant must put before the court everything material — including the facts that hurt them, the correspondence that tells the other side’s story, the weaknesses a fair opponent would raise — because the judge is deciding with one voice in the room and is entitled to the whole picture from it. The enforcement has real teeth: orders obtained on material non-disclosure can be discharged — sometimes regardless of whether full candour would have changed the outcome — with costs consequences, and with the applicant’s credibility spent for the rest of the case. For applicants, the practical rule: the affidavit is drafted as if the opponent will one day read it line by line, because they will. For respondents: lining the true record against the grounding affidavit is among defending’s most effective work.
The system’s honest logic: boldness at the interim stage is made tolerable by candour and by the undertaking as to damages — the two guarantees that whichever way trial goes, the empty chair wasn’t cheated. Applications built on that understanding get orders; applications built on advocacy alone get discharged.
An emergency that can’t wait for notice — or an ex parte order just served on you? 01 5827148, either chair.