Tag: self representation

Florida Bar issues report on access to legal services

The Florida Bar has sent a report to the state supreme court with suggestions for improving public access to legal services. According to the Bar’s press release, the suggestions include the creation of a permanent committee to address issues concerning self-represented litigants, increasing legal aid funding, expanding pro bono services, and lowering bars for legal interns to help represent clients.

Each of these suggestions, and many others like them, recognize the crisis of access to justice, which is especially acute in state court systems. And all of them are good ideas. But unsurprisingly, the suggestions are also deliberately crafted to preserve the special role of attorneys as gatekeepers to the legal system. Indeed, the press release itself mentions that last year the Bar pushed back against a much broader set of proposals, coming from the court system itself, which would have (among other things) tested non-lawyer ownership of firms and sought an expanded role for paralegals.

So this a turf war of sorts, but a constructive one. Access to justice is a real problem. Courts must recognize that attorneys will not readily cede their special role as intermediaries between the courts and the public, and attorneys must recognize that the public’s need for affordable and reliable court services far exceeds the ability of the bar to provide it. Much like the field of health care, where the model that predominated for decades is being upended to fit the needs of a modern society, so too the field of legal services is being upended. My sense is that changes are coming quickly, so it’s important that all stakeholders contribute to the conversation now.

Minnesota courts continue innovations regarding self-represented litigants

State courts have increasingly tried to keep up with the growth of self-represented litigants. Concrete numbers are elusive, in part due to varying definitions of “self-represented.”* But studies undertaken by individual states clearly demonstrate the burgeoning self-represented population in probate, domestic violence, family law, and even run-of-the-mill civil cases. Federal courts, too, report that almost 86,000 civil cases were filed by a self-represented plaintiff in Fiscal Year 2016 (most of them prisoner petitions).

This interesting article discusses the efforts of the Minnesota state courts to address the growing numbers of self-represented parties:

It’s not uncommon for pro se litigants to arrive at court with paperwork that’s either the wrong form or filled out incorrectly. These kinds of mistakes can gum up the system, court officials say. Now judges can sometimes send people straight from the courtroom to a self-help center.

“It helps people feel like they’ve been heard,” District Judge Bethany Fountain Lindberg said. “It also eliminates unnecessary hearings.”

While the number of court cases overall in Minnesota has decreased since 2010, the percentage of litigants proceeding without a lawyer remains high. Excluding traffic and parking cases, nearly 80 percent of cases heard in Minnesota district courts last year involved a pro se litigant at some point, state data show.

The reason is often financial, court officials say. The rise of the do-it-yourself web culture may also be behind the trend.

“It used to be that everyone had attorneys,” said Mike Moriarity, 10th Judicial District administrator. “Now there’s a spirit that people want to try doing it themselves.

* The Court Statistics Project, maintained by the National Center for State Courts, tracks self-represented litigation through a common definition, but the numbers are not available for all states.