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16 January 2015 / Dr Jon Robins
Issue: 7636 / Categories: Opinion , Legal aid focus , Procedure & practice
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Going solo

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A recent report illustrates the pressures facing the growing number of litigants in person, says Jon Robins

This is how one litigant in person, an electrician by trade, likened the daunting experience of coming before the family courts without a lawyer. “If I walked into a meter room, I could take the systems apart with my eyes closed. If you walked in there, you wouldn’t know what you were doing,” he explained in a conversation with a researcher in a new study published by the Ministry of Justice. Similarly, he walked into that courtroom and felt “absolutely blind”.

The report (Litigants in person in private family law cases) begins with the words of Lord Woolf, quoted in this column recently, which warned against the lawyers’ tendency to dismiss unrepresented litigants as “a problem for judges and for the court system rather than the person to whom the system of civil justice exists”. The “true problem” was the court system which was “often inaccessible”, the then Lord Chief Justice noted in 1995.

At

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