A lot of good research on litigants without counsel has been published in the last three or four years, most notably, in my view, Professor Julie Macfarlane‘s “Identifying and Meeting the Needs of Self-represented Litigants,” a trio of papers published by the Canadian Research Institute for Law and the Family on the views of Alberta judges and family law lawyers, and a report by the Institute with professors Nicholas Bala and Rachel Birnbaum (in press) on the results of a national survey of judges and lawyers. Although this research doesn’t necessarily label it as such, I’ve noticed that there’s a bit of a slippery slope effect to litigating without counsel, in which the the decision to self-represent, whether a choice was involved or not, seems to trigger a cascade of adverse effects that ultimately result in litigants without counsel achieving worse results in every major area of family law than would have been achieved with counsel.
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