The Court Received 144 Complaints About Lost Files Last Year. Your Record Is Your Own Responsibility.

Key Data

Lost files drew 144 complaints to the Office of the Judiciary Ombudsman in 2024/25, about 11.9% of the 1,206 complaints handled (SOJAR FY 2024/25, Table 4.1.2; s.4.1.4, Ch.4 p.178-180). Tampered files drew a further 14 complaints, which the report flags as a warning on the integrity of case records (s.4.1.4, p.181). The Magistrates' Courts generated the most complaints overall, 651 of them (s.4.1.4, p.180). The CTS now has a File Movement feature to track the location of a physical file, plus Exhibit Management and Securities Management features (s.2.3.1, p.47). Reading note: the figures and features are reported in the SOJAR; the workflow reading and actions below are CounselConnect's interpretation, not legal or financial advice.

What Is Happening

A lost file is not a clerical footnote when it is your matter and your hearing date. In 2024/25 lost files were the third most common complaint category to the Judiciary Ombudsman, behind judicial-discretion grievances and delays. Fourteen more complaints alleged tampered files, which the report itself treats as a warning sign on record integrity, not a rounding error.

The Judiciary has responded with tooling. The Case Tracking System now carries a File Movement feature that records where a physical file is, alongside Exhibit Management and Securities Management. The capability to know exactly where a file sits now exists. Whether it is used on your matter depends partly on you.

Why It Is Happening

Institutional and capacity: high-volume registries, paper files in motion, and uneven digitisation produce loss and misplacement, which is why the Magistrates' Courts, the busiest tier, drew the most complaints. The new CTS features are the structural answer; the human answer is advocates who keep their own complete record.

Practice Impact and Revenue

Treat the court's file as a copy of your record, not the original of it. If a registry loses the file before a hearing, the matter that proceeds is the one you can reconstruct from your own certified bundle. Case strategy gains a quiet defensive layer: a clean, indexed, certified set of pleadings and orders, mirrored to CTS where you can, means a lost physical file becomes an inconvenience rather than an adjournment or a collapse.

Revenue Impact

This is risk management, not a billing line, and it protects the fees you have already earned. A matter that stalls because the registry lost the file is a matter that does not progress to taxation, so your own complete record is what keeps the work, and the bill, moving. Build the discipline into your file-opening process and it costs nothing per matter while removing a recurring point of failure.

Strategic Insight — What Most Advocates Will Miss

Most advocates assume the court will keep the file safe, and notice the gap only when a file goes missing on the morning of a hearing. The miss is that the SOJAR both quantifies the risk — 144 complaints in a year — and hands you the tool to manage it, the CTS File Movement feature. The advocate who maintains a certified parallel record and tracks the file's movement online is insulated from a failure that still catches others flat. This is CounselConnect's reading, offered as opinion and not as legal or financial advice.