If you are lodging a subpoena on the University, please be aware of the following.
Service
General Counsel is authorised to receive subpoenas for the production of University documents and other court orders.
To ensure proper service, the subpoena should be addressed to ‘The Proper Officer’ or ‘General Counsel, Charles Sturt University’ and sent to the Address for Service:
Legal Services
Charles Sturt University
346 Leeds Parade
ORANGE NSW 2800
Attention: The Proper Officer
A copy of the subpoena should also be emailed to legal@csu.edu.au to assist in processing.
However, to ensure valid service, you must still serve the original subpoena a the above Address for Service.
The University’s lawyers cannot accept service of subpoenas or other court orders directed to University staff on personal matters. Such documents must be served directly on the relevant individual.
Compliance time and return date
The University is a very large organisation with multiple campuses and does not hold all documents centrally.
Archived records may be held at secure sites off campus.
To ensure your subpoena is complied with, please allow a minimum of 14 days for the University to contact each relevant area of the University and seek documents that fall within the scope of the Subpoena.
If the University is unable to produce the documents in time, Legal Services may contact you to seek an extension.
Description of documents
A clear description of the documents you are seeking can save considerable time in locating those records within the University.
Details that help the University locate relevant documents include:
- if a person is an employee or student (or former employee or former student
- if a person is a student (or former student) what their student number is
- the person’s full name (including any previous names)
- the person’s date of birth
- the time period relevant to the documents
- if known, any specific areas of the University from which the documents are sought.
The University regularly receives subpoenas seeking information about students, such as: “all records related to Jane Doe” or “all transcripts, results, timetables, attendance sheets and medical records relating to John Doe”.
A subpoena of such broad scope will require searches across a broad range of documents across multiple University campuses and offices and will be time consuming and costly to locate and prepare documents in response.
A party issuing party a subpoena can only legitimately ask for documents which are relevant to the issues in dispute in the proceedings.
If you do not intend the subpoena to be that broad, please limit your description to records that you actually need. It is in your interests not to put the University to considerable expense in producing documents which are ultimately irrelevant to the issues in dispute, as you will likely be asked to indemnify the University for its costs.
If we consider that the documents or categories of documents requested are not relevant to issues in dispute, we may contact you to ask you to reconsider the scope of the subpoena, or to confirm that you will indemnify the University for the costs of production.
Conduct money and reasonable costs
The prescribed amount of conduct money must be paid for all subpoenas.
If the amount of conduct money is not prescribed then the minimum cost of handling a subpoena at the University is $75.00. Payment must be provided upon service of the subpoena.
This minimum amount covers up to 2 hours of staff time searching records, copying/scanning up to 100 pages and delivery of the documents to the court or tribunal.
If the time involved and records located exceeds these minimums, the University may contact the organisation serving the subpoena to discuss payment of our reasonable additional costs, as follows:
- professional staff time at $275 an hour
- administrative staff time at $75 an hour
- photocopying or scanning documents at $0.20 per page.
