Tribunal members are usually as helpful as they can possibly be to unrepresented parties. Just by hiring a lawyer a bad owners corporation does not magically become a winner.
The Tribunal was intended to be lawyer-free but this has been allowed to slide as Members felt they were wasting too much time explaining basic strata law to self-representing owners.
Yet one more argument for a fast-track system where a panel of experts – a strata lawyer, strata manager and independent committee member – could give litigants an immediate sense of whether their case was likely to fly or probably doomed to fail.
All most people want in these cases is:
- To be heard
- A definitive answer from an independent and knowledgeable source that they can trust.