Submitting the Case Papers

If you do not get a response after 30 days of the receipt of the legal notice, the next stage would be to file the case in the appropriate Consumer Redressal Forum. Check this page for more details on which forum you need to approach. If the case papers are being prepared by a lawyer, they will use the right template required.

In my case, once I got an update that the company had not responded to the legal notice even after 45 days, I asked the lawyer to start preparing the case documents. On Voxya, it usually takes 7-9 days to prepare the documents after which it's sent to your address via registered post. Once you get the documents, it's recommended that you go in person to the relevant forum to submit the documents.

While submitting the documents, you will also need an affidavit from a lawyer. Since the Voxya papers were unsigned, I approached a lawyer on the court premises to sign the affidavit for me. They also made some suggestions to Voxya's format including updating the title and including some additional information in the Complainant and Opposite Party fields.

Once the documents are filed, you will get the case details over SMS within a couple of days. Considering how the case papers were stacked up in the office, I didn't expect that the information would be digitized and was pleasantly surprised when I got the SMS. You can search for the case ID in the Case Tracker listed under the Useful Links to get details of the next hearing.

One thing to note, Voxya and other online consumer forums might state that it only takes about 2 hours to submit the case. However, that's just for the submission. Once the case is submitted, you'll either have to hire a lawyer to represent you or make the time to be present for each of the hearings. On Voxya, submitting the case papers via a lawyer costs Rs. 9,500 and each hearing costs Rs. 800, plus any additional court fees. You can also represent yourself instead of hiring a lawyer (which is what I did). This is known as Party in Person or PIP. Choose this option if you are confident about arguing the case yourself and can make the time to attend each hearing. Usually the hearings are on weekdays and (at least in our court) the proceedings start on the dot at 10:30 am.