Last reviewed: July 2026 · For use in England & Wales · eLitigant is a Community Interest Company (No. 16566612), not a law firm.
A standalone piece from our Publications shelf, on what kind of company we chose to be — and the five-hundred-year-old idea we chose it for.
Help usually arrives on the back foot
Britain’s advice sector does heroic work, and nothing in this piece forgets it. Debt triage, eviction defence, benefits appeals, the queue that forms wherever a free clinic opens its doors — this is magnificent, necessary work, done under funding pressure that would break most organisations. We are proud to work alongside it.
But notice the shape of almost all of it: it is defensive. The sector is funded for crisis, so it meets people at the moment something is being done to them — the claim form on the doormat, the notice seeking possession, the benefit stopped. By the time help arrives, someone else has already chosen the battlefield. The shield is offered generously. The sword is almost never.
The sword as well as the shield
Being wronged creates rights. The unpaid invoice, the undelivered service, the deposit never returned, the contract broken — each of these gives an ordinary person a lawful claim, and bringing that claim properly is not aggression. It is participation. Nobody issues a claim for fun; a person who files does so because something has gone wrong and the law offers a remedy.
Yet look at who actually uses the claiming machinery. As we set out in Who Wins by Default?, 93% of the 1.2 million county court judgments in England and Wales in 2025 were entered by default — judgments entered because no defence was filed at all. And where a defence does get filed, the machinery is unevenly distributed: in January to March 2026, both sides had legal representation in just 25% of money claim defences, against 87% of damages claim defences. Individuals experience the civil courts as a place where things are done to them, not a place they can use. That asymmetry is not fixed by shields alone.
This is eLitigant’s difference, stated plainly: we equip people for both halves of justice. The defence filed on time when you are the one served — and the properly pleaded claim through Online Civil Money Claims (OCMC) when you are the one wronged. The same professional standard, pointing in whichever direction your facts demand.
Why a community company
The structure is the strategy. eLitigant is a Community Interest Company — a form with a legal asset lock, meaning the company’s assets are bound to its social purpose by statute, not by promise: they cannot be transferred out for less than their market value, and any dividend is capped by law at 35% of distributable profits, so the great majority of any surplus stays with the purpose. We are not a charity dependent on a grant cycle that funds crisis work and little else; we are not a venture-backed startup that must one day charge whatever the market bears. We are the third model: a self-funding public purpose, where the users fund the mission — and the mission is that both the shield and the sword are within an ordinary person’s reach.
That independence is precisely what lets us build the unfashionable half. No funder’s remit confines us to emergencies. When someone arrives having decided, calmly, to pursue what they are owed — we can serve them too.
Not seen since 1515
There is a precedent for all of this, and it is older than most of the common law’s furniture. The Court of Requests had roots in the previous century — a tribunal of the King’s Council with origins traced to the 1480s, hearing the causes of the poor and the King’s servants. But its great age began in December 1515, when Thomas Wolsey became Lord Chancellor: under him the court was expanded, came to sit at the White Hall of the Palace of Westminster, and served ordinary suitors on a scale that led historians to call this its era as “the court of poor men’s causes” (Law and History Review). Poor suitors — servants, husbandmen, widows — brought their own causes, pleaded them cheaply and simply before the King’s councillors, and were heard. Not tolerated: heard, in a forum designed around them.
It is worth remembering why the profession became indispensable in the first place. In Wolsey’s England most suitors could not read or write, court records ran in Latin, and pleading ran in Law French — a maze with no map, in languages the ordinary person had never spoken. Representation was not a luxury then; it was an interpreter, for a world in which the litigant genuinely could not speak the court’s language. That justification was real, and for centuries it held.
Now look at it today. The modern litigant reads, writes, researches, and handles more formal paperwork in an ordinary year than a Tudor householder met in a lifetime. The original reason for compulsory intermediation — that ordinary people could not participate — has quietly expired. What remained missing was never capability but craft: the drafting discipline the profession spent centuries refining. And craft, as we argued in It Is a Technological Thing, is exactly what technology now carries to anyone with a case to put — to a genuinely elite standard. The profession remains the answer to real complexity. It no longer needs to be the price of basic participation.
The centuries since professionalised litigation into something ordinary people fund through their taxes but experience mostly as defendants. The idea that a court could be organised around the unrepresented suitor — that their causes deserved a proper forum and their persons proper regard — has never quite had its machinery back. Five hundred years on, we think the tools finally exist to rebuild it: not as a special court, but as a standard of preparation that makes every court work the way the Court of Requests was meant to.
Retiring an old insult
Every litigant in person eventually hears the proverb: “he who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client.” It deserves to be taken seriously before it is retired, because its serious half was never about intelligence. It was about distance: a person inside their own dispute struggles to see it coldly, which is why even lawyers, when they are sued, traditionally instruct other lawyers. That concern was honest. But notice the assumption doing the quiet work underneath the proverb — that the only way to buy distance and discipline was to hire another human being.
That assumption has aged badly. A modern drafting process is itself a discipline: it takes a story and forces it into facts, the facts into issues, and the issues into the form the court actually needs — accepting no adjectives and no grievances along the way. The litigant supplies the truth; the process supplies the distance. Structure is the new objectivity. A person who prepares that way is not “their own lawyer” in the proverb’s old, lonely sense at all — and a proverb that still reads self-representation as folly is reading from a page that history has already turned.
Respect is earned on the page
We are careful about what we mean by respect. It is not demanded, and no court owes it to bluster. It is earned — the way any officer of the court earns it — through documents that are complete, on time, properly evidenced and honestly argued. That is why we hold our users to the standard we do, and why narrowing the issues sits at the centre of everything we build. Raise the standard of what litigants file, and every case they put is stronger for it. That is the whole theory of the company.
Where we stand
A community company, funded by its users, building the sword as well as the shield — in service of an idea English justice has carried since at least 1515: that the causes of ordinary people deserve a proper hearing, properly prepared. We did not invent that idea. We are just giving it its tools back.
Impartial justice, accessible to all. We are funded by the users, for the people who need us most.
Free to start · no sign-up · no card. Tell Chris what has happened and see whether we can help before you pay anything. One matter · one case folder · a full day of drafting · 7-day guarantee on the standard of the drafts. If money is tight, Help with Fees can remove the court fee entirely, and Citizens Advice is free — we will always tell you when you do not need us.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
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Tell us what has happened and what you need. Every document is quoted case by case, on its size and the time it needs, and the price is agreed with you by email before any work starts. Nothing is charged until you say go.
Once agreed, it comes back to you within one working day (business documents usually within the hour). You read it, check every date and figure, sign it and file it: it stays your document throughout. No need to attach anything now — once we reply, you send your papers by email.
We use your details only to reply to this enquiry. eLitigant CIC is not a law firm and does not give legal advice. You remain the author of your documents.