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How Courtroom Innovations Help Self-Represented Litigants
The Toronto Star posted an interesting story this past weekend discussing how courtroom innovations in New York, the U.K. and Windsor, Ontario are helping self-represented litigants navigate the legal waters.
You can read the story here.
There is a complete absence of mention of what is being done in Toronto. If the answer is “nothing”, then perhaps we should all be looking at what can be done.
Matt and other readers – this journalist contacted NSRLP and asked for a briefing on innovations and “solutions” being tried to address the large and growing number of SRLs. Of course that list is a long one, and we gave her a selection of innovations from across the country, including (but by no means limited to!) our students’ work on legal coaching.I also connected her to a Toronto based legal coach, but she decided to go with the student angle.
I think there is a particular interest in the media in writing about innovations that “retool” the approach of lawyers and other forms of assistance to enable SRLs to get help from more affordable sources. I know of many people working on this across Canada and certainly including Toronto. However one structural barrier at present to the development of affordable resources in Ontario is the restriction on para-legals doing any family work. Hopefully a new slate of Benchers will re-visit this issue soon.