Last reviewed: July 2026 · For use in England & Wales · eLitigant is a Community Interest Company (No. 16566612), not a law firm.
The final part of a three-part series. Part One set out the promise of equal footing; Part Two showed how professional-standard paperwork narrows the issues. This part is about why the gap between promise and reality closes now.
A system already adapting — and worth meeting halfway
The courts of England & Wales are changing: online money claims, digital filing, reformed procedures designed with unrepresented users in mind. Those reforms deserve recognition — and they work best when litigants can meet them with documents of a professional standard. That meeting point, where an adapting system and a well-prepared litigant find each other, is where access to justice actually happens.
As our work grows, we intend to contribute something further: careful, anonymised research on how self-represented parties fare across the system, measured against the national picture — evidence offered in the same spirit as everything else we publish, to help the promise of equal footing be kept everywhere.
The vacuum, measured
The scale of what receded is documented. The National Audit Office found that the Legal Aid Agency approved 300,496 civil legal aid matters in 2013-14 — against the 685,459 it would have been expected to approve had the reforms not happened, and 17% fewer even than the reduced figure the Ministry of Justice had itself projected. The same audit recorded an increase of 18,519 cases, or 30%, starting in the family courts that year in which neither party had legal representation, and put the resulting cost to HM Courts & Tribunals Service at an estimated £3 million a year (National Audit Office, Implementing reforms to civil legal aid, HC 784, 20 November 2014). Disputes did not disappear with the funding; they simply arrived differently. Whatever view one takes of the policy, the arithmetic is impartial: support did follow — the Ministry committed approximately £2 million over two years towards help for litigants in person — but representation receded faster than anything arrived to replace it.
And the stakes are constitutional, not commercial. In R (UNISON) v Lord Chancellor [2017] UKSC 51, Lord Reed put it in a single sentence: “The constitutional right of access to the courts is inherent in the rule of law.” Access is not a privilege that arrives with professional support. It is part of the architecture of the law itself — which is why a gap in who can meet the courts’ standards is everyone’s problem, and why closing it is such serious work.
It is a technological thing
One belief underneath all of this, stated plainly: the representation gap is not a moral failing — not of the courts, not of the profession, and not of the people who stand alone. It is a technological thing. For most of that history the difference was machinery, not merit. A represented party had a precedent bank behind them, a supervisor above them and a second pair of eyes before anything left the office; an unrepresented party carried the identical duty to the court with none of it. That was a limit of tooling, never a judgment on anyone’s worth — and limits of tooling are the kind that lift.
Nobody issues a claim for fun. A person who files through the online court or submits by electronic filing does so because something in their life has gone wrong and the law offers a remedy. Their case deserves to travel exactly as far as its facts and the rules can carry it — no further, and no less. Equal footing, in the end, must live on the file, not in sentiment: it is measured in documents that are complete, on time, and properly argued.
That is why our work is engineering, not argument. The rules already make the promise. Technology now puts that same machinery within reach of the litigant who has none.
Where we stand
We hold both commitments at once, and we see no tension between them: respect for the rules, and the equipping of every person to use them fully. The court’s authority and the litigant’s dignity rise together on the same well-prepared page.
Impartial justice, accessible to all. We are funded by the users, for the people who need us most.
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