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contract law against corporations and businesses), has become more
lucrative in comparison. The rich can and do still hire lawyers for
divorces, but many middle class citizens do not anymore.
As a result of the increasing numbers of people representing
themselves, the courts have struggled with increases in badly written
pleadings and other filings and with increased continuances (i.e.,
postponing court dates), as the courts had to give more time to parties in
order to fashion their cases in an acceptable way.
Self-represented litigants have also increased in other kinds of law
cases. In some cases, including even divorce cases, poorly prepared cases
have led to bad court decisions and thus denied justice.^3 The courts, and
the legal profession as a whole, had to take note and do something about it.
There is a major effort going on in the American legal community, and
there are similar efforts occurring in other nations as well, to increase
“access to justice,” i.e., to try to enable those who are not receiving their
proper due in court to be able to do so. It is within this context that the
author performed the work that is the background for this paper.
This paper uses as its empirical data the work of the Washington State
Access to Justice Board in creating plain language divorce law court
forms. The purpose of creating plain language versions of the court forms
is to enable some litigants representing themselves to be able to do their
own work more easily and to enable court and legal aid services to aid
other such litigants more easily in helping them to prepare their own cases.
A secondary advantage of plain language court forms is that they are more
easily translated into other languages by court interpreters. As the Program
Manager for the Access to Justice Board’s Pro Se Project, I managed this
program for several years. (“Pro Se” is the legal jargon term in
Washington State for a person who represents himself in court.) The
Project had over seventy volunteers – judges, family law lawyers, legal aid
(^3) One example would be a ruling that the ex-husband would have to pay a certain
amount of child support that was actually beyond his capacity to do so. In this
case, the ex-wife would eventually return to court to seek a ruling of contempt
against the former husband, which until recently could cause the husband to go to
jail. The time and expense of the court, not to mention the injustice of the
incarceration, could have been avoided with adequate pleadings by the ex-husband
in the initial case. See the decision of the United States Supreme Court at Turner v.
Rogers, United States Reports, v. 564, 2011, also found in Supreme Court Reports,
v. 131, p. 2507-2527.