Superior Court Of Justice

I have an unfortunate opportunity to live in Toronto when it comes to filing for divorce. My documents are not scanned in the system. To make it worse, most of my important documents are gone!!! I have been going there to find out what the status of my application but they kept giving me unclear answers. The manager on the 10^th floor gave me his cell number and was told that he would get back to me personally as soon as he found my file. I called him and after a few months of waiting and making follow ups, there’s still no clear answer. My former lawyer filed for my documents at the beginning and spent almost $ 20K for everything (children’s custody, properties, etc) so now that I have been dealing with my divorce on my own, it’s quite frustrating to find out how much papers (money too, of course) they have lost and couldn’t even figured out where those papers were.

Every so often I must attend here for a case conference, motion, and even to file documents myself when it a rush and my process server cannot make it. Attending for motions or case conferences is not as painful as filing documents as they are usually scheduled beforehand. Even so, the said motions and case conferences rarely begin on time. Filing documents on the 10^th floor is a nightmare as there is always a substantial wait time. They need to adopt a rule whereby those who are not prepared are sent to the back of the line as these individuals cause a substantial delay. Outsourcing management of this operation would also be helpful as the staff tends to work painfully slowly under the ministry. Overall, send a process server, and generally try to avoid this place whenever possible.

I have been going here on and off again for over 10 years and it doesn’t get any better. It’s funny but the men that work the family court counter on the 10^th floor actually do a great job, ask questions keep serving people etc. The women do everything they can to look busy when doing nothing and every single one has demonstrated a strange hostility to my self representation that the men do not. I am not sure if the women act that way with men (as I am a woman) but the men seem to want to help everyone. I look forward to a day where the counter help have to justify their jobs like people in the private sector do. I have been in a customer service management role for over 20 years and most of these people would be long gone because of their lack of respect and apparent indifference to the people waiting.
I do agree that the 9^th floor is like another world. There is a man named Peter that works on that floor dispensing information and he used to be on the 10^th floor. I suggest anyone going to represent themselves, go to the 9^th floor first. They will tell you what you need, they are faster and much more gentle for the first timers!

I had the unfortunate opportunity to visit here to file for divorce. I arrived at 8:15 expecting a decent sized line but I was the second to arrive. However, by 8:25 there were probably 10 people behind me. When the doors opened at 8:30 the first woman in line took off to the other side of the office, which left me first up. I took a number but still ended up having to wait 10 minutes for the first clerk to be ready.
She was your typical union government employee; Grumpy, not friendly at all, just doing her job to the letter of her job description. She put in the minimum amount of effort to answer my questions.
Once I had filed my papers and gotten everything stamped, I was sent down to the 9^th floor to the Family Law information office to get the paperwork for step two. The security guards at the entrance were really nice and friendly. We chatted for a minute or two while I went through the screening procedures. What a world of difference between the 10^th floor and the 9^th. The two people working in the information office were awesome! So friendly and nice and walked me through the next procedures very thoroughly. They answered all my questions above and beyond.
As great as an experience as I had with the staff I don’t look forward to going back, but I’m relieved that some of the staff understand that people aren’t coming in under the best of circumstances and try to make the best of a bad situation for you.

This is where you go if you have to settle any sort of civil court case. Let me tell you the wait times are unspeakably long and the staff is incredibly (and understandably) terse.
Take any local government service experience you’ve had — passport renewal, health card, driver’s licence, etc. — and multiply the level of annoyance and inconvenience by about a thousand and you’ll begin to understand what it’s like to set foot in this place. Unpleasant to say the least.
Please check out the photo that I uploaded (which, by the way, could have had me promptly tossed out had an employee actually been on duty to catch me in the act) to begin to grasp the court’s archival ‘procedure’.
Take a slip of paper, write down a description of the documentation that you want to sign out, your name, D.O.B. and today’s date on it, and place it back on the desk. Not in a pile, not in any order of preference — just loosely on the desk where someone will eventually get to it.
There are different colours of paper but that doesn’t indicate a different level of importance or type of request. It’s just a random quirk. No reason for it being this way.
Ahhhhhhh.