Excerpt from UniCourt:
Why do you think it’s important to equip consumers with the tools to handle their own disputes? How do you think that companies like yours will change the legal practice landscape?
Sonja Ebron: We all have a constitutional right to petition our government. And yet our courts are so backward that they require us to pay tens of thousands of dollars to a lawyer to represent us, to exercise that constitutional right. That, in our opinion, is a violation of access to justice, therefore a violation of the rule of law, and therefore a violation of a basic tenet of democracy. If regular people lack the ability to petition a branch of our government without spending their life savings, then we don’t have a democracy.
The experience of thousands of our customers suggests that average people can do much of what a lawyer on full-scope representation does for a client. A combination of technology and basic education in civil procedure can help the average person handle much of that work. Our toolset provides an opportunity for consumer lawyers to practice their profession at a higher level – to help people who are representing themselves – through the delivery of a la carte services. There’s an opportunity here for consumer lawyers to change the way they do business and develop more profitable business models serving self-represented litigants.
