Somebody has sued you, the summons has arrived, and the instinct is to sit down and write out what really happened. That instinct produces the wrong document. A written statement is not your account of the dispute — it is an answer, and it has to work through the plaint paragraph by paragraph saying, for each one, what you admit, what you deny, and what the correct position is instead. The reason this is not a matter of style is the rule underneath it: an allegation that is not denied may be treated as admitted. A defendant who writes four eloquent pages of their own version, and never replies to paragraphs nine to twenty-three, has not told their story — they have conceded nine to twenty-three. The second trap sits immediately next to the first. Saying that the plaint is false, frivolous, concocted and denied is not a denial; it is an evasive denial, which the Code treats as no denial at all. A real denial says what is wrong with the allegation and what actually happened, which means somebody has to go through the plaint line by line with your documents in front of them. And the third is time, which is where most of the damage is actually done. The Code gives thirty days, a court may extend it for reasons recorded, and after ninety days the court’s own power to take a written statement on record is constrained — in certain commercial matters, more strictly still. Nobody can promise you an extension, and the week people lose being frightened is a week they needed for something else: collecting their own documents, because those are filed with the written statement, and bringing them in later needs the court’s leave. There is one more thing people discover too late, and it is the most expensive omission on this page. If you have a claim of your own against the person suing you, or money owed to you that should be set against theirs, that belongs with the written statement. Decide it now, not after the case has started moving.
The single most useful thing to understand before anybody starts writing is that a written statement is a responsive document. Its shape is dictated by the plaint, not by you.
That feels wrong to most defendants, and understandably. You have been sued on a version of events you consider dishonest, and the thing you want to do is set the record straight from the beginning. But the court is not being asked, at this stage, to read a competing account. It is being asked to find out which of the plaintiff’s assertions you accept and which you contest, because that is what determines what has to be tried at all.
Think of the plaint as a list of statements and the written statement as the column next to it. Every statement needs something in the column. Your own account is valuable and belongs in the document — but it goes after the column is complete, not instead of it.
This is also why a written statement cannot usefully be drafted from a conversation. Somebody has to sit with the plaint, numbered paragraph by numbered paragraph, and your documents, and produce a reply for each. It is slow, unexciting work and it is the whole of the exercise.
The rule that makes all of this matter is simple and severe: an allegation in the plaint that is not denied in the written statement may be treated as admitted.
Read that again in terms of what it means practically. You do not have to agree with something for it to be taken as agreed. You only have to fail to deal with it. A paragraph skipped because it seemed minor, a paragraph missed because the numbering slipped, a paragraph left out because nobody checked that the replies ran to the end — each of those is capable of handing the other side a fact they would otherwise have had to prove.
So the last check before any written statement is filed is mechanical and it is not optional: count the paragraphs of the plaint, count the replies, and make sure every number is accounted for. Not approximately. Each one.
The places this goes wrong are predictable. A long plaint where the last few paragraphs are formal ones about cause of action, limitation, court fee and jurisdiction — those get skipped because they look like boilerplate, and they are exactly the ones that matter for a preliminary objection. A plaint with sub-paragraphs, where the reply deals with the main one and not the parts. And an amended plaint, where the replies were written against the original numbering.
Sitting next to the silence problem is its opposite, and it catches people who thought they had been thorough.
A written statement that says the contents of paragraphs so-and-so are false, incorrect, frivolous, concocted and denied has, in the eyes of the Code, not denied them. That is an evasive denial, and the scheme requires a defendant to deal with the substance: not merely to say that something is wrong, but to say what is wrong with it and what the position actually is.
| Instead of | Which is |
|---|---|
| “The contents of paragraph 7 are false and denied.” | An evasive denial. It tells the court nothing it can try. |
| “It is denied that the goods were delivered on the stated date. No delivery was made on that date; the consignment arrived later, as the record filed with this statement shows.” | A denial. It identifies what is disputed and puts a competing fact on the record. |
| “The entire plaint is a bundle of lies and is denied in toto.” | Not a reply to anything, and frequently read as a reply to nothing. |
| “Paragraph 12 is not within the knowledge of this defendant.” | A legitimate answer where it is true, and far safer than a denial you cannot stand behind. |
The practical consequence is that a proper written statement takes effort proportionate to the plaint. A forty-paragraph plaint cannot be answered in two pages, and anybody offering to do that quickly is offering you an evasive denial with your name on it.
| The trap | What it costs |
|---|---|
| Narrating instead of answering | Every unanswered allegation stands. You have told your story and conceded theirs. |
| Denying generally instead of specifically | The denial is treated as no denial. The paragraph is effectively unanswered even though you addressed it. |
| Losing the first fortnight | Your documents are not collected, the deadline arrives, and what should have been filed with the statement now needs the court’s leave. |
There is a fourth that belongs here even though it is not about drafting: deferring the counter-claim. A defendant with a genuine claim of their own who files only a defence has, in most situations, given up the chance to have both decided together, and will now have to begin separately — later, with its own time limits running in the meantime.
Place Order — Free · pay after work
Not drafting. The first week is for assembling, and the reason is purely practical: the drafting cannot be done properly without the documents, and the documents cannot be filed later without leave.
Day one and two. Read the plaint. Confirm that every annexure it refers to is actually there. Note the case number, the court and the date.
Day two to four. Pull your own papers on the dispute, including the ones you expect to be unhelpful. Bank records, agreements and their amendments, invoices, delivery proof, messages, emails, earlier notices and your replies.
Day four to five. List what is missing and who would have it — a bank, an office, a former employee, a relative, a counterparty — and start those requests, because they take the longest.
Day five onwards. Drafting, against the documents rather than against memory.
Where the papers have accumulated over years and nobody can find anything, that is a separate and fixable problem. Our legal file management service puts a file into usable order, and our digitisation guide deals with doing it properly — which matters here, because the fact that rescues a defence is frequently on a page nobody has looked at in six years.
Most defendants read a plaint once, in a state of alarm, and never again. Read it three times, for three different things.
The first reading is for the claim. What is being asked for, from whom, and on what basis. Ignore the adjectives.
The second reading is for the facts asserted, paragraph by paragraph, marking each one as true, false, partly true, or not within your knowledge. This is the reading that becomes the written statement, and it should be done with the documents open.
The third reading is for what is not there. A document referred to but not filed. A date that does not match another date in the same plaint. An agreement described without its amendment. A claim that assumes a step that nobody says happened. Those absences are frequently worth more than anything you can say about yourself.
Keep a sheet while you read, with three columns: the paragraph number, your answer in a word, and which of your documents bears on it. By the end of the second reading that sheet is the skeleton of the written statement, and the drafting becomes assembly rather than invention.
A useful trick, particularly with a long plaint: read the prayer first.
The relief claimed tells you what the suit is for, and it very often reframes everything before it. A plaint full of allegations about conduct may end in a prayer only for money. A plaint that reads like a money claim may end in a prayer for a declaration about property, which is a different matter with different consequences. A plaint may ask for an injunction whose terms matter far more to you than the damages attached to it.
Working backwards from the relief also tells you which facts actually matter. A plaint has many paragraphs; usually only some of them are load-bearing for the relief claimed. Those are the paragraphs where the reply has to be exact and supported, and the rest can be answered properly but briefly.
It is equally the place to notice whether the relief is one the suit can even support — and that is a preliminary objection rather than a matter of fact, which is dealt with further down.
A plaint usually refers to documents and files them. Sometimes it refers and does not file, or files something incomplete — the first page of an agreement, a statement without the relevant entries, a notice without its postal record.
You cannot properly answer an allegation built on a document you have not been given, and the honest reply says so rather than guessing. Where a document is missing, the reply to that paragraph records that the document relied on has not been supplied and that the defendant is unable to admit or deny the contents, reserving the position once it is furnished.
Deal with this openly in the written statement itself rather than quietly working around it. A reply that denies the contents of a document you were never shown is a reply that can be turned against you when the document arrives and says something you could have lived with.
The same applies to a document that is illegible in the copy supplied. Ask for a legible copy, and record in the reply that you have asked. Our certified true copy service obtains what is on the court record where that is the quicker route.
Place Order — Free · pay after work
This is the procedural point that surprises defendants most, and it is the reason the first week matters so much. The scheme of the Code is that a defendant produces the documents they rely on along with the written statement.
Not later, not when the evidence stage arrives, not when the matter heats up. With it. The logic is sound — the court and the other side are entitled to know, at the outset, what the defence rests on — but it means that document-gathering is not a later stage of the work. It is the first stage.
List before you collect. Write down what should exist based on the dispute, then find each one. Collecting first and listing afterwards is how things get missed.
Include the unhelpful ones that you will have to deal with anyway. A document the other side already has is not a document you can keep out.
Originals matter. Know where each original is, even where a copy is being filed, because you will be asked.
Mind the complete version. An agreement with its annexures and amendments; a statement covering the relevant period, not a single page; a message thread with the messages before and after the one you like.
It is not impossible, and defendants do it — but it needs the court’s leave, and leave is a matter of discretion exercised against a defendant who already had an opportunity.
What determines the outcome is the explanation. A document that genuinely came into existence later, or that was in the custody of somebody who took months to supply it, is a different proposition from a document that was in your own drawer all along. The second is the common case, and it is the weak one.
Assume, when preparing, that what you file now is what you will have. Every defence built on “we can produce that later” is a defence with a hole in it, and the hole appears at the stage when it is hardest to repair.
There is a related practical point about things that are not documents at all. Photographs, recordings, site conditions and physical states change. Where something about the present situation supports your case, record it now — dated photographs, a measurement, a written note of who saw what — because in two years the condition will have changed and the recollection will have faded.
The Code provides for a written statement to be presented within thirty days from the date of service of summons. That is the baseline, and it is shorter than most defendants expect it to be, particularly when the first week goes on alarm.
Two things about that period worth being precise on. It runs from service, not from when you got round to reading the papers or from the first date in court. And it is a period for filing, which means the drafting, the document collection, the signature and the verification all have to fit inside it, not just the writing.
Work backwards from the date rather than forwards from today. If the thirtieth day is a known date, the drafting has to be complete several days before it, which means the documents have to be in hand before that, which means the collection starts now. Most missed deadlines are missed by people who started on time and planned the wrong way round.
A court may allow a written statement to be filed after the thirty days, on such other day as it may specify, for reasons to be recorded. That is the provision, and the words that matter in it are for reasons to be recorded.
It is not an entitlement, it is not automatic, and it is not a formality that happens because everybody does it. What is being asked for is an indulgence, and it is given on an explanation of why the statement could not be filed in time — which is a different thing from an explanation of why more time would be convenient.
Apply, do not assume. Where more time is needed, that is an application made before the period runs out rather than an apology offered afterwards.
Have a reason that is about inability. Papers in somebody else’s custody, a party abroad, a genuine illness, a volume of documents that could not be assembled — these are reasons. Not having got round to it is not.
Come with the statement as far as it goes. An application for time accompanied by a substantially prepared written statement is received very differently from one that is not.
Do not build the defence on it. Prepare as though no extension will be given, because sometimes none is.
Our application drafting service prepares the application where one is needed, and our application drafting guide deals with how such a request should be framed so that it reads as an explanation rather than as a request.
Place Order — Free · pay after work
Beyond the extension lies the limit that defendants most need to know about: once ninety days from service have gone, the court’s own power to take a written statement on record is constrained.
The significance of that is worth stating plainly, because it is different in kind from everything above. Up to that point the question is whether the court will exercise a discretion in your favour. Past it, the question becomes whether the court has the power to help you at all — and a judge sympathetic to your position cannot simply make the problem go away.
So ninety days is not “thirty days with a comfortable buffer”. It is the outer edge of the whole exercise, and the defendant who treats the first thirty as the real deadline is the one who never has to find out what lies past the ninetieth.
How the position past that point is dealt with depends on the facts, the stage of the matter and the explanation, and it is squarely a question for an advocate rather than for a page like this one. What is not in doubt is that it is a far worse place to be standing than the one you were in on day twenty-nine.
For suits that fall within the commercial-disputes framework, the position on time is tighter than the ordinary civil rule, and the leeway that exists in an ordinary suit is substantially narrower or absent.
Whether a particular matter falls within that framework depends on its subject and value, and that is not something to assume from the parties being businesses. It is a question to settle at the very start, because the answer changes the deadline you are working to — and discovering in week six that you were on the stricter clock is not a recoverable position.
So the first question to ask about any commercial-looking suit is not about the facts. It is: which regime is this suit under, and what is my actual last date? Ask it on day one, of somebody who can answer it.
Where your matter is in that category, the whole of the advice on this page about the first week compresses further. The document collection has to be immediate, and the drafting has to run alongside it rather than after it.
People reach this page in that position, and the useful thing is a sequence rather than reassurance.
Find out exactly where the case has reached. Whether the matter has proceeded in your absence, whether anything has been ordered, and what the next date is. Nothing can be decided until this is known.
Prepare the written statement now, completely. Any application for leave is immeasurably stronger when the document is ready to be filed with it rather than promised.
Assemble the explanation honestly. With whatever supports it — a medical record, correspondence showing a document was awaited, proof that service reached an address you were not at.
Stop losing days. Every further week is both another week of delay and another week of the other side’s case moving forward.
Take it to somebody who can argue it. This is now an application to be pressed, not a document to be filed, and the outcome depends on how it is presented.
What not to do is wait for the next date to see what happens. The next date is when the position hardens, not when it clarifies.
A defendant who neither appears nor files does not thereby pause the case. The matter can proceed in their absence and be decided, on the plaintiff’s material alone, without anybody testing it.
What that produces is not merely a loss. It is a decree, and a decree has consequences that arrive without further warning: it can be enforced against property, against a salary, against accounts. Our execution guide describes that process from the other side, and it is worth a defendant reading it precisely because it shows what the paper you are holding can turn into.
Undoing a matter decided in your absence is possible in the situations the law provides for, and it is harder, slower and more expensive than answering was — and it has its own time limits. The cheapest moment in this entire story is the one you are in now.
Place Order — Free · pay after work
The order is settled by practice and it is worth following, because a court reads these documents in sequence and expects to find things where they belong.
| Part | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Preliminary objections | Points that go to whether the suit should proceed at all — limitation, jurisdiction, parties, maintainability. First, because they can end it. |
| Parawise reply | One reply for every paragraph of the plaint, in the plaint’s own numbering. The bulk of the document. |
| Your own version | The facts as you say they are, set out as a connected account rather than scattered through the replies. |
| Counter-claim or set-off | Where there is one — your own claim against the plaintiff, or money to be set against theirs. |
| Prayer | What you say should follow: dismissal, and whatever else is sought. |
| Verification and signature | Signed and verified, stating which parts are true to knowledge and which on information and belief. |
| Documents | Filed along with it, listed, with originals accounted for. |
Two habits that make such a document easier to use later: keep the reply paragraph numbers tied to the plaint’s numbers so that anybody can read the two side by side, and keep your own version short enough to be read in one go. A written statement is a working document for the rest of the case, and the person who will suffer from a confusing one is you.
These are the points that say the suit is not fit to proceed, and they are put first because, where one succeeds, the facts never have to be tried.
They are not a formality and they are not padding. A preliminary objection is a real argument, and raising one that has no basis costs credibility at the stage when credibility matters most. Equally, failing to raise one that exists is a genuine loss, because some of them are harder to take later.
Limitation — that the claim is out of time. Dealt with in its own section below.
Jurisdiction — that this court cannot try this suit, by subject, by value, or by place.
Parties — that somebody necessary is not before the court, or that you have been joined with no cause against you.
Maintainability — that the suit as framed does not disclose a case, or that the relief sought cannot be granted in this form.
Valuation and court fee — where the suit has been valued in a way that affects what the court can hear.
An agreed forum — where the parties agreed how disputes would be resolved and this suit is not that.
Which of these apply is a legal assessment of your specific papers, and it is one of the two places on this page where an advocate’s view genuinely changes the outcome rather than merely improving the presentation.
It is the most powerful of the preliminary objections and the most under-used, because it requires somebody to do arithmetic that nobody enjoys.
The question is simple to state: when did the cause of action arise, and was the suit brought within the period the law allows for that kind of claim? The work is in the first half, because the plaint will frame the starting point in whatever way helps the plaintiff, and the documents frequently show a different one — an earlier breach, an earlier refusal, an earlier demand.
So the exercise is: build a dated chronology from the documents rather than from the plaint’s narrative, and then see where the suit falls. This is a day’s work and it occasionally ends the case. It is also work that produces value even where limitation does not apply, because the chronology is what the whole written statement gets drafted against.
Watch for the devices that move the starting point: an acknowledgement said to have been made, a part payment said to have been received, a notice said to have been replied to. Each of those is capable of restarting a period, and each is capable of being disputed on the documents. Where the plaint relies on one, that paragraph is the most important paragraph in the plaint and deserves the most exact reply in the written statement.
Jurisdiction comes in three flavours and a written statement should be clear about which one is being taken, because they are not interchangeable.
Subject-matter — whether this kind of dispute goes to this kind of court at all, or belongs before a tribunal or a specified forum. Pecuniary — whether the value of the claim is within what this court can try. Territorial — whether this is the right place, which turns on where the cause of action arose, where the defendant resides or carries on business, and in some matters on where property is.
Territorial objections are the commonest and the most often mishandled, in both directions. Defendants take them reflexively when they are inconvenienced by the location, which is not the test; and they miss them where the plaint has been filed somewhere with only a tenuous connection to the dispute, which sometimes is.
Where there is a clause in the agreement about where disputes are to be brought, read it carefully and read it early. Such clauses are frequently decisive and they are frequently forgotten by the party who signed the agreement years ago — which is another reason the agreement and all its amendments belong in the week-one collection.
Place Order — Free · pay after work
Two objections that look technical and are frequently substantial.
The first is that somebody who ought to be before the court is not. Where the relief claimed cannot sensibly be granted without a person being bound by it — a co-owner, a joint borrower, a party to the same agreement, a company whose act is complained of — their absence is a real problem with the suit and not a quibble.
The second is that you should not be there. People are joined to suits for a range of reasons, not all of them good: because they are related to somebody, because they signed as a witness, because they are a director of a company, because their name appears on a document. If the plaint discloses no cause of action against you personally, that is an objection to take at the start and to take clearly.
Both need the same thing from you: a clear account of who the actual parties to the underlying transaction were, with the documents that show it. Which is, again, the week-one collection.
This is the body of the document and the part that cannot be rushed. The method is mechanical and it works.
Take the plaint’s paragraph one. Write reply one. Take paragraph two. Write reply two. Continue to the end, including the formal paragraphs about cause of action, limitation, valuation and jurisdiction, which are frequently where the preliminary objections live and are almost always skipped.
Keep the numbering identical. Where a plaint has 1, 2, 3(a), 3(b), 4, the replies carry those numbers. Renumbering is how paragraphs get lost.
Deal with sub-paragraphs separately where they contain separate assertions. A single reply to a paragraph with four assertions in it answers one of them at best.
Never reply to two paragraphs together unless they genuinely say the same thing, and say so expressly where you do.
Where a paragraph has several parts, split the answer. Admit what is true, deny what is not, and say which is which, in the same reply.
Check against an amended plaint if there is one. Replies written against the original numbering, filed against an amended plaint, is a mess somebody has to untangle later.
Every reply does one of three things, and knowing that is most of the drafting discipline.
| Answer | When | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Admit | The assertion is true | Takes it out of dispute. Nobody has to prove it and nobody can argue about it later. |
| Deny, with the correct position | The assertion is wrong, in whole or in part | Puts it in issue and tells the court what the contest is about. |
| Not within knowledge | You genuinely do not know | Leaves them to prove it without committing you to a position you cannot support. |
Admitting is not weakness, and this is worth saying because defendants resist it. Admitting what is plainly true — that an agreement was signed, that a payment was received, that a notice came — narrows the case to the things that actually matter and makes the rest of your denials believable. A written statement that denies everything, including the date on its own agreement, reads as a document that cannot be relied on, and that impression carries into the parts where you are right.
Three elements, and a denial missing any of them is weaker than it needs to be.
What exactly is denied. Not the paragraph as a whole where only part of it is wrong — the specific assertion.
What the correct position is. This is the element most often missing. A denial that leaves a gap invites the court to fill it with the plaintiff’s version.
What supports it, where something does — the document filed with the statement, the entry, the date, the correspondence.
One caution about the third element. A written statement is a pleading and not evidence; it states facts rather than arguing them, and it should not become a submission. The distinction in practice is between “no payment was made on that date; the payment was made on the following month’s date as the bank record filed herewith shows”, which is a fact with a reference, and two paragraphs explaining why the plaintiff’s version is implausible, which is argument and belongs later.
And never deny something your own documents contradict. It happens more often than it should, usually because the drafting was done from a conversation rather than from the file, and the cost is disproportionate: one such denial, put to you in cross-examination, colours everything else you said.
Place Order — Free · pay after work
This is the reply defendants under-use, usually out of a feeling that it looks weak. It does not, and it is frequently the only honest answer available.
Where a plaint asserts something that happened between other people, or something about the plaintiff’s own affairs, or a document you have never seen, or an event you were not present at, you are not in a position to admit it and you should not pretend to be in a position to deny it. Saying that the matter is not within your knowledge is accurate, and it leaves the burden where it belongs.
The practical test: could you be cross-examined on this denial and have to concede that you have no idea? If the answer is yes, it should not have been a denial. “Not within my knowledge” cannot be broken in cross-examination, because it is true.
The one thing to avoid is using it as a default. A written statement where half the replies say the matter is not within knowledge — including about the defendant’s own transactions — reads as evasion and will be treated accordingly.
After the replies, and in its own section, your account of the facts belongs in the document — and this is the part most defendants actually wanted to write at the beginning.
It matters, for a specific reason. The parawise replies, however complete, are fragmentary; read on their own they do not tell anybody what you say happened. A connected account, set out in order, is what makes the defence comprehensible, and it is what the rest of the case will be conducted against.
Chronological. From the beginning of the relationship to the dispute, with dates.
Factual. What happened, not what it proves and not what it says about the plaintiff’s character.
Supported. Each significant fact tied to a document filed with the statement.
Complete on the difficult parts. If there was a delay, a default, an unanswered message, deal with it here on your own terms rather than leaving it to be produced against you.
Short. Long enough to be clear, short enough to be read in one sitting by somebody who knows nothing about the matter.
Abuse. Characterisation of the plaintiff as a cheat, a liar or a fraud adds nothing and subtracts from how the rest reads.
Argument. Reasons why the plaintiff’s case is weak belong in submissions, not in a pleading of facts.
Evidence. A written statement states what you say happened; it does not reproduce the proof of it. The documents go in alongside, and the proof comes at the evidence stage.
Matters you cannot stand behind. Every sentence in it can be put to you in cross-examination years later, by somebody who has read it more carefully than you have.
Unnecessary private detail about yourself or others. A pleading becomes part of a court record; include what the defence needs and no more.
Admissions by accident. A loosely worded explanation can concede a fact you were disputing three paragraphs earlier. This is what a careful read before filing catches.
The single most useful thing a defendant can do for their own case is to be completely honest about the bad parts with whoever is drafting.
Every real defence has them: a payment that was late, a notice that went unanswered, a message that reads badly, a document that was signed without being read, a promise made and not kept. Defendants conceal these, out of embarrassment or in the hope that they will not surface. They surface. They surface in the plaintiff’s documents, or in cross-examination, and when they do, the written statement that ignored them looks worse than the fact itself.
A written statement is built around the weak facts, not in spite of them. A difficult fact acknowledged and explained on your own terms, in your own document, is a fact the other side can no longer spring on anybody. The same fact denied and then proved is the end of your credibility on everything else.
Which means the conversation before drafting should spend more time on what worries you than on what you are confident about. The confident parts draft themselves.
Place Order — Free · pay after work
If the plaintiff owes you something — money, performance, a remedy arising out of the same or a related transaction — you can bring that claim inside this suit instead of starting your own. That is a counter-claim.
Its advantages are real. One court decides both sides of the dispute, which avoids the situation where two courts reach different views of the same facts. The evidence is led once. And a plaintiff who was pursuing you now has to defend as well, which changes the shape of the matter considerably — frequently including their appetite for continuing it.
It is a claim, and it is treated as one. It needs the particulars of a claim, the valuation, and whatever the court requires for a claim of that kind, including fee.
The plaintiff answers it. They file a reply to your counter-claim, and the matter proceeds on both.
It can survive the suit. A counter-claim does not simply disappear if the plaintiff loses interest in their own suit, which is one of its practical strengths.
It belongs with the written statement. This is the point of the next section, and it is the reason this decision cannot be left for later.
Where a separate suit is the better route after all, our civil suit drafting service prepares it — but that choice should be made deliberately now, not arrived at by default because the moment passed.
A set-off is narrower than a counter-claim and simpler. Where the plaintiff claims a sum from you and a sum is due to you from them, a set-off puts the two against each other so that what is in issue is the net amount.
Its natural home is a money suit between parties with a running relationship — a supplier and a buyer, a contractor and an owner, a landlord and a tenant — where each side has entries against the other and the plaint has presented only one column of the account.
Practically, the most useful thing a set-off does is reframe the case. A suit for a round sum, met by a set-off, becomes an exercise in working out an account rather than a claim to be allowed or dismissed. Many such matters settle at that point, because once both columns are on the record everybody can see what the real figure is.
What it requires from you is the account itself: the entries, the dates, and the documents behind each one. A set-off asserted as a round figure without that working is weak, and it is better not to assert it at all than to assert it in a form you cannot support.
Both the counter-claim and the set-off belong with the written statement, and a defendant who thinks about them afterwards has usually lost this route to them.
The consequence is not that your claim disappears. It is that you now have to pursue it separately — a fresh suit, its own fee, its own timetable, in a court that knows nothing about the case already running. Two proceedings about one relationship, each moving at its own pace, is a materially worse position than one, and it is a position chosen by inaction rather than by decision.
And there is a second clock. Your own claim has its own limitation period, which has been running throughout — through the negotiation, through the notice, through the suit being filed against you. A claim that was comfortably in time when the summons arrived may not be by the time you get round to a separate suit two years later.
So the question “do I have a claim against them?” belongs in the very first conversation, before drafting begins. The answer is frequently yes and the defendant had not thought of it in those terms, because they had been thinking of themselves as the one being attacked.
A written statement is signed and verified, and the verification is not a formality to be copied from a form. It is a statement about the document, and it distinguishes what you say of your own knowledge from what you say on information received and believed to be true.
That distinction is read, and it has consequences. A fact verified as true to your own knowledge is a fact you are asserting personally and will be cross-examined on as such. A fact verified on information and belief is one you are putting forward on what you have been told — which is appropriate where it is true, and which is a weaker foundation.
Go through the document before verifying it, paragraph by paragraph, and be satisfied about each one. The signature is not administrative.
Separate the two categories accurately. A verification that claims personal knowledge of everything, in a document containing things you could not possibly know personally, is a problem waiting for cross-examination.
Do not sign a draft you have not read. This happens, and it is how defendants end up bound to a version of events they do not hold.
Keep a signed copy with the list of documents filed, so that you know in two years exactly what was on record.
Place Order — Free · pay after work
Where the defendant is not an individual, somebody signs for it, and that person’s authority has to exist and to be in order.
For a company that means an authorisation to act in the proceedings in the manner the company’s own constitution and the law require. For a partnership it means a partner with authority. For a proprietorship, the proprietor. Where an attorney signs under a power of attorney, that power must actually cover proceedings — a power drawn for a transaction frequently does not.
There is a second, practical point about an organisation signing a written statement: the person who verifies it should be somebody who actually knows the facts. A written statement verified by a senior officer with no personal involvement, in a dispute whose details sit with somebody who has since left, produces a difficult evidence stage. Think about who will eventually have to depose, and involve that person in the drafting.
Where several people or entities have been sued, the first decision is whether to file one written statement or separate ones, and it is decided by whether your positions are genuinely identical.
They rarely are. Two brothers sued over a family property may have different dealings with the plaintiff. A company and its director may have entirely different exposures. Two partners may have signed different documents. Joint filing makes sense where the defence is one defence; where it is two defences that mostly agree, separate statements are safer.
A joint statement binds you to the others’ admissions. That is the central risk and it is not always visible at the drafting stage.
Interests can diverge later — in evidence, in settlement, on appeal — and unwinding a joint pleading at that point is awkward.
Cost is a real consideration and joint filing is cheaper, so where the positions truly are the same it is the sensible choice.
Decide once, at the start. Starting jointly and separating later is the most expensive version of this.
Watch the deadlines separately. Service may have happened on different dates for different defendants, so the thirty days may not run together.
A written statement can be amended, but only with the court’s leave, and leave is a discretion rather than a right.
What governs it is the stage and the explanation. An amendment sought early, to correct something or to add a fact that has emerged, is a different proposition from one sought after evidence has begun, which looks like repair work. Amendments that withdraw an admission are looked at with particular care, for the obvious reason that an admission relieved the other side of proving something they may now be unable to prove.
Which is the reason for the whole of the care recommended on this page: the written statement is the document you are tied to. Everything that follows — the issues, the evidence, the cross-examination, the arguments — is conducted on the ground it defines. Days spent getting it right are the best-spent days in the whole case.
Filing the written statement is the end of the first stage and the beginning of the contested one. In broad terms what follows is: the pleadings are complete, the court frames the issues that arise, evidence is led on those issues, and arguments follow.
Two things change in character at that point. The pace becomes the court’s rather than yours, which after the urgency of the first thirty days is disorienting; matters can sit for long stretches. And the documents become fixed — what is on record is what you will be working with, which is the point made earlier about collection.
What also begins is the possibility of interim applications in both directions, and that is the moment to understand what the other side can seek quickly. Our reply drafting service prepares answers to such applications as they come, and our application drafting service prepares your own.
Place Order — Free · pay after work
This is the mechanism that explains why everything on this page matters, and it is rarely explained to defendants.
After the pleadings, the court identifies the issues — the specific questions that have to be decided — and those come from the points on which the parties disagree. An assertion admitted produces no issue, because nothing is in dispute. An assertion denied produces an issue, and that issue is what evidence will be led on.
So your written statement is not merely an answer. It is the document that sets the agenda of the trial. What you denied is what will be tried. What you left unanswered will not be tried, because it is no longer in dispute — and that is the whole reason a missed paragraph costs so much.
Read in that light, the drafting discipline earlier on this page stops being procedural fussiness. Each careful denial is a question you are putting on the trial’s agenda; each sloppy one is a question you have failed to put there.
Years later, in the witness box, the first document put to you will be your own written statement, and the questions will be about the distance between what it says and everything else on the record.
That prospect should shape the drafting in three specific ways. Nothing goes in that you cannot support. Nothing goes in that your own documents contradict. And nothing goes in that you would not say out loud under questioning — which rules out the colourful denials that feel satisfying when the summons is fresh.
The written statement to aim for is one that, read aloud in cross-examination, sounds like a careful person who told the truth including the inconvenient parts. That document is hard to attack. A document that denied everything is attacked for an afternoon, and the afternoon is remembered.
Where the plaint, or a document relied on in it, is in a language other than the one the record runs in, that is a real difficulty and not something to work around by guessing at the contents.
Two separate problems. Your own understanding — you cannot instruct properly on a document you cannot read, and a reply drafted on somebody’s casual summary of it is a reply at risk. And the record — where something has to be before the court in a particular language, a translation that the court accepts is a different thing from a translation for your own use.
Our certified translation service produces the kind that is accepted, and our legal translation guide deals with the difference between understanding a document and being able to rely on it. Where the papers themselves are a heap, our digitisation and OCR service makes a large set searchable so that the drafting can be done against the documents rather than against memory.
Somebody holding a summons with two weeks gone, who spent the first fortnight hoping it would turn out to be a mistake. The commonest call.
A business sued by a supplier or a customer, with its own counter-claim it had not thought of in those terms.
A family member joined to a property suit who cannot see what the case against them personally is.
A landlord or a tenant on the receiving end of a suit after a notice exchange went nowhere.
Somebody whose date has already passed, who needs the statement ready and an application with it.
A guarantor or a director sued alongside the principal party, with a different defence from the company’s and no separate statement drafted.
Place Order — Free · pay after work
The complete plaint, with every annexure and document filed with it, and the list of documents if there is one.
The summons, and the date it was served if you know it — this is the date everything is calculated from.
The case number and court, and the next date if one has been given.
Your own papers on the dispute: agreements and all amendments, invoices, receipts, bank entries, delivery records, messages, emails, the notice and any reply.
An honest account of the weak points. This is the most useful thing in the whole list and the one people hold back.
Whether money is owed to you by the person suing — because that decides whether this is a defence or a defence with a claim attached.
Nothing needs to be organised and nothing needs to be explained in legal terms. A bag of papers and a plaint is the normal starting point.
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| The date | First thing: when service happened, which regime the suit is under, and what your actual last date is. In writing, before anything else. |
| Completeness | Every annexure the plaint refers to checked against what you were given, and the gaps listed for you. |
| Your documents | A list of what should exist, so that collection runs alongside the drafting rather than after it. |
| Chronology | A dated chronology built from the documents, not from the plaint’s narrative. This is where limitation and the contradictions show up. |
| Parawise reply | One reply per paragraph, in the plaint’s numbering, each one admit, deny with the position, or not within knowledge. |
| Objections and claim | Preliminary objections identified; the counter-claim or set-off question answered explicitly rather than left open. |
| The count | Before filing: paragraphs of the plaint counted against replies, every number accounted for, and the verification gone through with you line by line. |
Two things we say during the work rather than at the end: if a denial you have asked for is contradicted by your own document, and if the honest reading of the papers is that part of the claim is simply admitted and the defence lies elsewhere. Both are better heard in week one.
Drafting a written statement and conducting the suit are two different kinds of work, and we are clear about the line.
The drafting, the document work, the chronology, the completeness check and the filing are documentation, and that is ours. It is a substantial share of what decides the outcome, because the issues that get tried come from this document and from no other.
What is not ours is the judgement about strategy and everything that happens in the room: which preliminary objections are worth taking in your particular matter, whether a counter-claim is wise as against merely available, appearing, examining and cross-examining witnesses, and arguing the case. That is legal work and it needs somebody entitled to do it, engaged for the matter from the start rather than brought in at the evidence stage. If you do not already have an advocate, our advocate directory lists verified advocates by city and by the kind of matter they handle, so the choice stays with you.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.
Draft a two-page denial of a forty-paragraph plaint. It can be produced quickly and it is an evasive denial with your signature on it.
Deny what your own documents contradict, even where you ask us to. We will tell you what the document says and draft around the fact instead.
Promise you an extension. Nobody can, and a defence prepared on that assumption is a defence at risk.
Leave the counter-claim question open. It gets asked and answered before drafting, because afterwards is usually too late for this route.
Put abuse or argument in a pleading. It does not help and it changes how the rest reads.
Guess the contents of a document you have not got. The reply records that it has not been supplied, which is both honest and safer.
Let you sign something you have not read. The verification is gone through with you, line by line, before signature.
Backdate anything. Not a statement, not a covering letter, not an application for time.
Place Order — Free · pay after work
The honest framing here is that you are buying the ground the rest of the case will be fought on, and the price of that is small compared with what gets spent later standing on it. Drafting a written statement begins at ₹4,500, our part runs to 3 – 7 days once we have the plaint and your instructions, and the complete figure is agreed with you before drafting starts rather than invoiced afterwards. Nothing is taken in advance. A long plaint with many annexures is more work than a short one and is quoted as such, and a counter-claim or a set-off is separate work with its own figure, stated separately so you can see what each part costs.
Filing charges and whatever the court levies are the court’s own and reach you as the court’s figures. Conducting the suit is an advocate’s engagement made and paid by you directly, and we take no share of it.
What makes a defence expensive is almost never the drafting. It is the fortnight lost at the beginning, the document that had to be brought in by application because it was not collected in time, the amendment sought because the first statement was written from a conversation, and the counter-claim that became a second suit. All four are avoidable in the first week.
And the part that costs nothing, which is where most of this page’s value sits: find out your real last date on day one and write it down; collect your own documents before anybody starts drafting, because they are filed with the statement and not later; reply to every single paragraph and count them before filing; say what is wrong and what the correct position is instead of saying the plaint is false; admit what is plainly true so that your denials are believed; say “not within my knowledge” where that is the truth rather than denying something you cannot stand behind; tell whoever drafts it about your worst fact first; decide the counter-claim question now and not later; and read the verification yourself before you sign it.
A written statement is not your account of the dispute — it is an answer, and what you do not deny may be taken as admitted, which is why a defendant who writes four pages of their own version and never replies to paragraphs nine to twenty-three has conceded nine to twenty-three. Saying the plaint is false and frivolous is not a denial either; it is an evasive denial, and a real one says what is wrong and what the correct position is. Then there is the clock: thirty days, an extension that is for reasons recorded rather than for the asking, and a constraint on the court’s own power past ninety — stricter still in commercial matters. We start by telling you in writing what your actual last date is, check that every annexure the plaint refers to was really given to you, build a dated chronology from your documents rather than from their narrative so that limitation and the contradictions surface early, reply to every numbered paragraph with an admission, a real denial carrying the correct position, or an honest statement that the matter is not within your knowledge, identify the preliminary objections, answer the counter-claim and set-off question explicitly because both belong with the statement and not after it, and count the paragraphs against the replies before anything is filed. Send the plaint with its documents and tell us your worst fact first — a defence is built around the difficult facts, and nothing is payable until the figure for the whole job is settled with you.
Two doors, both free. Clients search a factual directory of enrolled advocates. Advocates apply to be listed on it — no fee, no commission, nothing paid in either direction.
Search Bar Council enrolled advocates by what your matter is about, by court, or by city. Searching and sending a request are both free.
Enrolled advocates anywhere in India can apply to be listed. Your entry is published only after we verify your enrolment number with your State Bar Council.
Would rather not pick anybody? Tell us the matter instead — one form goes to every advocate at once, and the first to take it up calls you.
This directory carries no ratings, no reviews, no rankings and no fees — only the factual particulars the Bar Council of India permits, published at each advocate's own request. Browse the network · Terms for Advocates