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We don’t do much Latin these days in law. Plain English is all the rage, but without a single doubt the most frequently used word is ‘quorum’.

In strataland, a quorum is the minimum number of voters who must be present at any general meeting (be that the annual one or an extraordinary one) in order to have a valid meeting.

Simply put, if you don’t have a quorum, you don’t have a meeting.

If a quorum for a meeting is not present within 30 minutes of the proposed starting time, the meeting must be adjourned to be held at the same place, on the same day and at the same time, in the next week.

If at the adjourned meeting, a quorum is not present after 30 minutes, the people who are there (whether personally or otherwise) are deemed to form a quorum. So an adjourned meeting can have every resolution decided by a single vote if only one person chooses to participate.

This covers the apathy that reigns supreme in most bodies corporate. If no one shows up that is a different story for another day.

But back to that initial meeting. There are two requirements for a quorum:-

the required minimum number of voters being physically present at the meeting; and
votes from at least 25% of voters.
This sounds simple in theory but it gets a lot more complicated. Click here to read on.