Founder, eLitigant CIC
“We failed so you don’t have to.” It is the line we print, in spirit, on everything we build — and it is the whole story of why eLitigant exists.
Ask any entrepreneur and they will tell you the same thing: you fail far more often than you win. Ideas are knocked back, plans fall apart, and progress rarely arrives in a straight line. What separates the people who come through is not luck or genius; it is how quickly they get back up after being knocked down. eLitigant was built on exactly that stubbornness.
Our founder, Scott Snaith, came to this the hard way. A businessman who had built and rebuilt companies across more than two decades — often ahead of the curve, from launching one of Britain’s first electric-bike companies to working at the frontier of the digital economy, and now artificial intelligence — he found himself facing a legal and administrative fight and, like most people, unable to justify the cost of a solicitor for every step of it.
So he set about preparing his own official court documents. It was slow, unglamorous, trial-and-error work: forms came back wrong, and deadlines were unforgiving. He got them wrong, worked out why, and did them again — until they met a professional standard. The paperwork, he realised, was the barrier; and the barrier could be beaten.
“As an entrepreneur you fail far more often than you win. What matters is not the fall; it is how quickly you get back up.”
Scott Snaith · Founder, eLitigant CIC
The barrier is the paperwork, not the merits
That experience revealed something the justice system’s own leaders have long acknowledged. In his review of the civil courts, Lord Justice Briggs described their “single, most pervasive and indeed shocking weakness” as their failure to provide reasonable access to justice for ordinary individuals and small businesses with small or moderate value claims. For most people the hardest part is not the law; it is the paperwork and the procedure.
That realisation became a conviction, and the conviction became our mission: impartial justice, accessible to all. Many people lose not because their case is weak, but because they never clear the procedural hurdles in front of it. eLitigant exists to change that — to bring the papers up to the standard the system expects, so that the merits can be heard on their own terms.
So Scott turned that hard-won, mistake-by-mistake knowledge into something other people could use. “We got the forms wrong so many times, and kept going until they were right,” he says. “That is the whole point of what we built: we failed so the people who come to us do not have to.”
Backed early by the University of Nottingham
The idea found its first backer in the University of Nottingham’s Ingenuity Impact programme, which awarded eLitigant its 2026 Inclusivity Prize. Its founder was later named a Gold Member of The Ingenuity Lab for his contribution to its founder community.
“Ingenuity backed us when eLitigant was little more than an idea, and the team at The Ingenuity Lab have been behind us at every step since,” Scott adds. “That is what a great university enterprise programme does: it takes unconventional ideas seriously, early, when it matters most. The mission has not changed since.”
How eLitigant works — and how it stays free
eLitigant is a not-for-profit Community Interest Company — a company whose assets are locked, by law, to its social mission. It helps people in England and Wales prepare their own court, tribunal and official documents to a professional standard. Anyone can use its free, step-by-step guides to the UK’s major forms at no cost.
For those who want the document produced with them, Chris — our technology — drafts it alongside the person, in minutes. An optional paid step, shown only inside Chris at the point you would export or import, keeps the free guides free for everyone. There is no subscription, and the person stays in control throughout: they check the document, they sign it, and they file it themselves.
Much of the advantage of having a lawyer comes from procedural familiarity and preparation — the right forms, the right steps, the right timing — rather than courtroom advocacy. Supplying exactly that, affordably, is how you help people meet the standard the system expects of everyone. Whether you have a lawyer alongside you or not, the papers still have to be right.
The people we hear from are rarely litigation enthusiasts. They are a parent chasing money they are owed, a family handling an estate after a bereavement, someone appealing a decision that has turned their life upside down. The same rigour that began with courtroom paperwork is now being applied more widely, to the everyday administrative tasks that life asks of everyone. As a Community Interest Company, eLitigant is, in its own words, “funded by the users, for the people who need us most”: the paid service keeps the free guides free.
For other founders, Scott’s message is about persistence more than triumph: “Expect to be knocked down. Just get back up faster each time.”
Why it matters — the evidence
- 93 per cent of the 1.2 million county court judgments in England and Wales in 2025 were default judgments — entered because no valid response was filed in time, not after a contested hearing. (Ministry of Justice, Civil Justice Statistics, 2025)
- In 2025, neither party had legal representation in 47 per cent of private family law cases. (Ministry of Justice, Family Court Statistics, 2025)
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eLitigant CIC is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. You check, sign and file.