Upholding the Rules, Claiming Your Place — Part Two: Narrowing the Issues

Last reviewed: July 2026 · For use in England & Wales · eLitigant is a Community Interest Company (No. 16566612), not a law firm.

Part Two of a three-part series. Part One: The Promise of Equal Footing set out the courts’ oldest promise and the honest reality of a paper system. Part Three: It Is a Technological Thing completes the series.

The quiet craft at the heart of litigation

Part One ended with the representation gap — a design reality, not anyone’s villainy. This part is about the craft that closes it on the page.

Every dispute begins wider than it ends. Two accounts of the same events, a folder of documents, months of worry — and somewhere inside all of it, a small number of questions a court actually needs to decide. The work of litigation, done properly, is the disciplined journey from the first to the second. The profession calls it narrowing the issues, and it is the least visible, most valuable skill in the whole process.

The rules prize it explicitly. The court’s own case-management duties include “identifying the issues at an early stage” and deciding promptly which need full investigation and which do not. A party whose documents arrive with the issues already identified — the facts stated plainly, the legal basis named, what should be admitted admitted, and what is genuinely disputed disputed with reasons — is not only helping their own case. They are doing case management’s work with the court rather than leaving it to be done for them.

This is where modern law technology earns its place: not by inventing anything new, but by carrying that old craft — structure, completeness, the discipline of relevance — onto the page of anyone with a case to put.

One standard, applied to everyone

The Supreme Court addressed the point directly in Barton v Wright Hassall LLP. In Barton v Wright Hassall LLP [2018] UKSC 12, Lord Sumption accepted that a litigant’s lack of representation “will often justify making allowances in making case management decisions and in conducting hearings” — “but it will not usually justify applying to litigants in person a lower standard of compliance with rules or orders of the court.” One standard, for everyone. A litigant cannot rely on indulgence; they can rely on the rules — which is precisely why their paperwork must meet the standard the rules assume.

The official statistics show how rarely both sides bring professional drafting to the same dispute. Of claims defended in January to March 2026, 38% had legal representation for both claimant and defendant; 39% had representation for the claimant only, and 3% for the defendant only (Civil Justice Statistics Quarterly, January to March 2026). The average hides the sharper fact: 87% of damages-claim defences had both sides represented, against just 25% of money-claim defences — and money claims are the everyday work of the county courts. The Ministry of Justice is careful to note that a blank representation field “does not necessarily indicate a self-represented party (or ‘litigant in person’)”, so these are figures for recorded representation, not a headcount of people standing alone. Read at their most cautious, they still describe a dispute in which one side commonly has professional drafting behind it and the other may not. That is the footing the craft of narrowing has to level.

Good paperwork does three jobs at once

Here is the idea at the centre of everything we do: a professionally prepared document upholds the court’s rules and exercises the litigant’s rights in the same act.

When a litigant in person files an application that is complete, on time, properly evidenced and clearly argued, three things happen at once:

• The court is served. Judges and court staff work through enormous lists. A clear, compliant document saves hearing time, reduces the risk of adjournments, and helps the merits be reached sooner. Good litigant paperwork is a gift to the system, not a burden on it.
• The litigant is heard. When a case is put properly, form is far less likely to stand between the person and the merits. Their actual arguments — not their unfamiliarity with procedure — become the thing the court weighs.
• The promise is kept. Equal footing stops being an aspiration in Rule 1.1 and becomes a fact on the file.

Accountability, the right way

The rules do not only tell litigants what to do. They provide every party — represented or not — with proper mechanisms when something goes wrong: applications to set aside or vary, requests for reasons, transcripts of what was said, and appeals. These mechanisms work best on professional-standard paper, prepared promptly and argued to the point.

Using the system’s own remedies, properly, is how the system is held to its own promise. It requires no accusation and no confrontation — only competence. That is the accountability we equip people for: the kind written into the rules themselves.

Who gets to hold the pen

For centuries the narrowing craft belonged to the profession alone — not by anyone’s design, but because only years of training could produce it. That ground has now shifted. When technology can help a litigant in person bring the same order to their paperwork, the question stops being who can afford the craft and becomes simply whether the work is done to standard. Why we believe the representation gap was never a moral failing at all — and why that is the most hopeful fact about it — is Part Three: it is a technological thing.

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