Who pays for a free court guide

Somebody pays for a free court guide. It is worth saying plainly who, because the answer explains almost everything about how this place is built.

The guides on this site are free. Sixty-seven of them, on the forms people are handed and expected to fill in alone, each one written from the legislation and the rules of court rather than from memory. No sign-up. No email. No wall halfway down the page. You can read every word of every one of them and leave without telling us your name, and a great many people do exactly that, which is the point.

They are paid for by the people who go on to use the drafting tool, and by people who never will. That is the whole model, and we put it in one line on the front page and in the footer of every page on this site: funded by the users, for the people who need us most.

It is an odd sentence to lead with, so here is what sits behind it.

Almost everyone who arrives here is having a bad month. They have a date, or a deadline, or a letter with a form number on it. Some of them can pay for help and some cannot, and the difference between those two groups is not the difference between people who deserve help and people who do not. It is usually just the difference between one month and another. So the guides had to be free at the point of reading, unconditionally, or the whole thing would only work for the half of people who happened to be all right that week.

Charging for the guides would have been simpler. It would also have meant that the person most likely to be shut out is the person most likely to be facing a court alone, and once you have noticed that, you cannot design it the other way round.

The numbers behind that are not ours. They come from the Ministry of Justice. In the first three months of this year, neither the applicant nor the respondent had legal representation in forty-nine per cent of private family law cases decided in England and Wales. In the civil courts, of the defended claims in April to June, nineteen per cent had nobody represented on either side. In defended possession claims, where the thing at stake is somebody’s home, it was thirty-nine per cent. The Ministry is careful to say that its measure is a proxy, inferred from a blank field in a case management system, and we repeat that caveat every time because it is fair.

What the Ministry does not publish is what happened to any of those people. It counts how many arrive without a lawyer. It has never once published what the court then decided, set against whether they had one. Not in the family courts, not in the civil courts, not in any year. Its own auditor said in 2014 that the department had not improved its data on this since 2010, and said again in May 2025 that the government still does not have the data it needs. A committee of MPs asked for it again in July. There has been no reply.

So nobody in this country can tell you whether a court system where half the cases have no lawyer on either side is producing fair outcomes. Not because the answer is bad. Because the answer does not exist.

We have started asking for it. There are letters going to the government statisticians who produce those releases, to the regulator that oversees official statistics, and to the body that advises on civil justice, asking for one new breakdown: outcomes, published against whether the parties had a lawyer. It is not a dramatic ask. It is a column in a spreadsheet. But it is the difference between a system that can show its working and one that simply asks to be trusted.

That campaign costs nothing except hours, and the hours have to come from somewhere.

eLitigant is a community interest company, number 16566612, registered in England and Wales. That means something specific and it is worth knowing what. A community interest company is bound by an asset lock: the assets and the surplus are legally tied to the community purpose and cannot be paid out to shareholders. There are no shareholders to pay. If this thing ever makes money, the money goes back into the same job.

Which brings us to the awkward paragraph, so we will make it short.

If we helped you, and you are able, you can support the work here. It goes to keeping access free for people who cannot pay, to keeping the guides current as the forms and the fees and the rules change, and to the campaign for the missing figure. A donation buys nothing in return. There is no members’ section and no thank-you tier. It simply means the next person in your position is not held back by cost.

And if you will never need us, that is the better reason. Most people reading this will go their whole lives without filing a court form, and some of them would still rather a stranger had the sentence that changes their afternoon than not. That is what the donations actually are. Not charity for us. A stranger buying somebody else a way through.

If you cannot give, nothing here changes. Read the guides. Send one to somebody who needs it. That helps as much and we mean it.

One more thing, because it belongs in a piece about money. We are not the only route, and often we are not the right one. Help with Fees is an online service that takes about a minute and can waive or reduce a court fee entirely if you are on a low income or certain benefits, and it should be the first thing anyone checks. Citizens Advice will talk to you for nothing. Support Through Court sends a trained volunteer to sit beside you, though it has only nine locations in England and Wales and none of them is in the East Midlands. Advocate can sometimes find a barrister to act free of charge. We put all of those in front of people inside the tool as well as outside it, including people who could afford to pay us, because a person who gets what they need from a free service has still got what they needed.

And if you came here because you have a form in front of you rather than a question about how we are funded, that is what the door is for. Start there. It costs nothing to find out where you stand.