Legal Self-Services

Jim Gardner, of SUNY Buffalo, has an interesting post at The Faculty Lounge, arguing that

[t]he capacity to acquire information, shop, travel, and do almost anything without human intermediation is conceived as a right, or at least a new baseline norm.  Insistence upon the necessity of human interaction as a condition for completing a transaction is now the deviation requiring justification.  At the same time, whether human adjuncts to transactions add value seems to be a matter of deep skepticism.

This certainly rings a bell. For what it’s worth, I usually prefer finding information myself (online) to asking for it; I am annoyed when I have to go to a bank teller instead of just using an ATM; and so on. (Though, unlike in prof. Gardner’s most extreme example, I have not taken to resolving disagreements with my room-mate via texting.) In prof. Gardner’s view, this creates problems for legal education (because students are skeptical about the value of human educators and advisers) and is bound to create problems for lawyers who, imbued with this self-service mentality, might lack the personal skills necessary to be professional, effective “human adjuncts”.

But there is another way in which the self-service mentality is already affecting the legal profession. As anyone involved with the legal system probably knows, it is increasingly common for litigants to represent themselves, causing no end of grief to themselves and serious troubles to lawyers and judges who have to deal with them. And while the cost of legal services, and lack of funding for legal aid (especially in civil matters) is a major cause of this problem, it is not the only one. People choose to forego professional assistance, even when they could afford it. They take false confidence from the availability of a great deal of legal information on the internet. The emergence of the self-service mentality described by prof. Gardner helps explain why.

But although share that mentality myself, it is important to stress that when it comes to law – as probably in at least some (though surely not all) other areas – it is a dangerous one. For people who choose to represent themselves rather than rely on a lawyer, consequences tend to be sad. As I wrote here,

law and justice, as any first-year law student learns, are very different beasts. CanLII might succeed in its stated goal, which “is to make Canadian law accessible for free on the Internet.” Yet it seems that by making law freely accessible, such resources give people a false sense of being able to succeed in the legal system without professional help, and even without more than a very superficial acquaintance with it, which leads them to fail to get the justice, if any, that the system could give them if used properly.

As I said back then, if you can help it, don’t try it at home.

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My apologies for the lack of posts lately. There seems to be little going on worth posting about, or perhaps my brain is in aestivation.

Author: Leonid Sirota

Law nerd. I teach public law at the University of Reading, in the United Kingdom. I studied law at McGill, clerked at the Federal Court of Canada, and did graduate work at the NYU School of Law. I then taught in New Zealand before taking up my current position at Reading. View all posts by Leonid Sirota