A year of silence on promised answers, chased from overseas

The situation

By the time Mona called us, the silence had already gone on for eleven months. She had a lawsuit underway over water damage in her Arnprior condo unit, a dispute with a neighbouring owner, Ngozi, an early childhood educator who had done much of the renovation work in her own unit herself on evenings and weekends, over work that Mona said had damaged her unit's plumbing and caused a slow leak into the ceiling below. Both sides had been examined under oath the year before, and both had promised, in the ordinary course of those examinations, to follow up afterward with documents and answers to questions neither side could answer on the spot at the time. Ngozi's follow-up answers simply never arrived, month after month, despite periodic reminders from Mona's previous lawyer.

To understand how the file had drifted that far, it helps to step back to the beginning. Mona had bought the unit years earlier as an income property and had never actually lived in Ontario herself, managing the rental entirely from overseas through a property manager, Yaa, who handled tenants, maintenance requests, and day-to-day issues on the ground. When the renovation dispute with Ngozi began, Mona had assumed the usual back-and-forth of a lawsuit would unfold on something close to a normal Canadian litigation timeline, with periodic updates she could review and respond to when convenient. Instead, after the examinations concluded, Ngozi's lawyer sent a short, partial list of documents and then went quiet for the better part of a year.

Mona, who ran her own small hairdressing salon and built her income around a steady book of regular clients, was managing all of this around a demanding work schedule and a time difference that put most Ontario business hours squarely in the middle of her night. Every email exchange with her previous lawyer had taken several days to fully resolve because of the lag between question and answer across that time difference, and after close to a year of limited visible movement she decided she needed representation that could manage the file more actively, rather than one that simply waited for updates to trickle in whenever the other side felt like sending them.

The dispute itself was not enormous by litigation standards, the repair costs and related losses sat somewhere in the tens of thousands of dollars, but it had been open for well over a year with no clear end in sight, and Mona's frustration was less about the dollar figure at stake than about a process that seemed to have simply stalled indefinitely with no one accountable for moving it forward. She wanted, more than anything, a clear sense of what could actually be done to unstick it.

Why this was harder than it looked

On its face, the problem looked simple: Ngozi owed answers and had not given them. In practice, undertakings, the promises made during an examination for discovery to follow up later with information or documents not immediately available, are notoriously easy for the other side to let slide, and notoriously slow to force through the court system. There is no automatic penalty for lateness built into the rules themselves. The usual remedy is a formal motion asking the court to order compliance, and that motion itself takes real time to prepare, schedule, and argue, adding weeks or months on top of the delay it is meant to fix.

The distance made every step of the process slower still. Mona could not simply drop into our office on short notice to review a document, sign an affidavit, or discuss a strategic choice over coffee. Court materials had to be reviewed and approved across a substantial time difference that meant a same-day question sent from our office often meant a next-day answer from her, and vice versa. We adjusted the way we worked by batching everything wherever possible: rather than sending Mona a stream of piecemeal updates as the file moved forward, we set a standing weekly call at a time that worked reasonably for both of us and used it to walk through drafts, decisions, and next steps together in one sitting, so nothing sat waiting on a signature she had not yet even seen.

There was also a quieter complication running underneath the procedural one. Yaa, Mona's property manager, had genuine personal knowledge of some of the damage and the timeline of the renovation next door, since she had been the one fielding tenant complaints when the leak first started and had documented the water stains as they spread. Getting a clear, properly usable statement from Yaa, who was not herself a party to the case and had her own busy schedule of properties to manage, took real coordination on top of everything already happening between Mona and the other side in the lawsuit itself.

Underneath all of it sat a genuine strategic question: how hard to actually push, and at what cost. A motion to compel is not free, it adds real cost and further delay to a file that already felt to Mona like it had too much of both. We had to weigh the added expense of bringing the motion against the near-certainty that, without it, the outstanding answers would simply never come at all, and advise Mona honestly and directly that the motion, however unwelcome as an added cost, was the only realistic way left to move the case forward at all.

What we did

1. Reviewed the full examination transcript line by line to identify exactly which undertakings remained outstanding. Before threatening any motion, we needed a precise, itemized list rather than a general complaint about delay, since a vague demand is easy for the other side to dispute, partially answer, or claim was already satisfied. This gave us a document we could attach directly to court materials without any further argument about what was actually owed and by when.
2. Sent a final formal demand with a firm, specific deadline before filing anything with the court. Courts expect to see that a party genuinely tried to resolve a compliance problem informally before asking for a formal order, and a clear paper trail of that attempt meaningfully strengthens a later motion. The demand also gave Ngozi's side one last, entirely unambiguous chance to avoid the added cost and delay of a motion altogether.
3. Prepared and served a motion to compel compliance with the outstanding undertakings. This was the single step that actually changed the pace of the entire file. A motion puts a real hearing date on the court's calendar, and a hearing date is the one thing that reliably moves a stalled matter, because it forces both sides to genuinely prepare rather than continue quietly putting the matter off indefinitely.
4. Coordinated Mona's review and approval of every filing around the time difference deliberately. We built a weekly video call directly into the schedule specifically so Mona could review drafts, ask questions, and sign off on materials without the compounding delay of asynchronous email chains, which had been the main source of lost time under her previous lawyer's arrangement for the file.
5. Obtained a detailed written statement from Yaa covering the property management timeline. Since Yaa had genuine first-hand knowledge of when the damage first appeared and how the neighbouring renovation had actually been carried out, her account filled an evidentiary gap Mona could not fill herself from overseas, and it meaningfully strengthened the underlying damage claim once the file finally moved forward again.
6. Negotiated directly with opposing counsel once the motion was served, rather than simply waiting for the hearing itself to happen. Motions often prompt real movement well before they are ever argued in front of a judge, since no side genuinely wants the added cost or the record of losing one. We used the concrete pressure of the scheduled hearing date to reopen direct, practical talks about actually producing the answers.
7. Secured production of the outstanding answers and documents shortly before the hearing date, avoiding a fully argued motion. Once it became clear the hearing would genuinely go ahead if nothing changed, Ngozi's side finally produced what had been promised over a year earlier, and we carefully confirmed the answers were complete and responsive before agreeing to adjourn the scheduled motion.

The outcome

The outstanding undertakings were finally answered, roughly thirteen months after they had first been promised during the examinations, and the underlying case was able to move forward on its actual merits rather than remaining stuck indefinitely on a procedural stall. That is a real, tangible result, but it is not a complete one: the year of delay was never recovered, and Mona incurred the added cost of preparing and serving a formal motion that a cooperative opposing side would never have made necessary in the first place.

The court did order Ngozi's side to bear a portion of the costs of bringing the motion, which offset some, though certainly not all, of the added expense the year of delay had caused Mona. It did not compensate her for the time itself, or for the ongoing strain of managing a stalled file around a full salon schedule and a demanding time difference. The underlying dispute over the renovation damage then proceeded toward the kind of ordinary settlement discussion that should reasonably have been possible a full year earlier, once both sides finally had the actual information the examinations had been designed to produce in the first place.

The answers Ngozi's side eventually produced were, once reviewed, broadly consistent with what Mona had expected, though they did narrow the scope of what could realistically be claimed for some of the plumbing repairs, since a portion of the damage turned out to predate the renovation in question. That adjustment, disappointing in isolation, at least gave both sides a genuine basis to negotiate toward a resolution instead of continuing to argue past each other with incomplete information.

For Mona, the more practical and lasting change was less about the specific legal result on the motion and more about how the file was managed afterward. The weekly call structure we had set up during the motion stayed firmly in place for the remainder of the case, and it meant that even from overseas, she was never again left in a position of waiting weeks at a time to learn that essentially nothing had moved on her file.

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