representing oneself without an attorney in a legal battle can be a frightening and overwhelming experience but what if a pro se or self represented litigant had access to tools and support that might make the experience a little easier a little less frightening well this is exactly the question that my next guest asked and answered by developing courtroom five a website to joining me today via skype is sanya a braun who co founded courtroom five with deborah sloan both represented themselves in civil court cases without an attorney many times and learned a great deal of along the way their experiences inspired them to share what they learned with others facing the same challenges their motto you don't have to go it alone welcome sonia thank you for having me marilyn so you are one of the brave individuals who have gone forth in the court system you know without that anchor or and without that  safeguard of having an attorney you had said to me in our pretty interview you spoke about representing yourself in court without an attorney many times so if you could tell us a little bit about some of the most challenging experiences that you've had and really as a pro se litigant and why you decided to to go forth as a pro se litigant sure sure great question let me take the second half of that first i think it's easier i decided to go pro se like so many others because i simply couldn't afford a lawyer or at least one that i could try to do a good job and represent me well you know you walk into laura's office and you're going to leave without five thousand dollars and so just to retain that lawyer it's not something that most of us can do and you may not understand this up front but you're only really going to get a analysis of your case and evaluations of your case for that amount of money you know a simple case can take ten to fifteen thousand dollars there was all if it's more complex you know you're talking fifty one hundred thousand dollars and again most of us just don't have that laying around let me say so that's the reason i think most of us go pro se and there are millions of people these days in the court having to make that choice you know i think some of the challenges there's just so many i could we little procedure and a discovery the hard way i will never forget my first deposition in a motel room you know there's just so many things you have to learn along the way and there's nothing out there directed  people at least to really help you do that and i i actually had asked you this we talked a little bit about it in our prey interview when you were representing yourself what was the reaction you got from friends and family and other people around you you know honestly there just weren't very many people who knew one of the things that many proclaim that because i know is that when you tell somebody you representing yourself in court it's automatically default who will what did you do wrong or you know you must not have had any money and there's nothing worse in american society than not having money you know we're talking about debt collection cases we're talking about child support that wasn't a we're talking about you know even just not being able to afford a lawyer all of those they you're broke and there's something wrong with you and so most of us don't tell our friends and family we just suffer alone it's an extremely isolating experience it is it is having gone through it i know firsthand so and how did you feel that people in the court system itself treated you from you know the the other lawyers judges paralegals administrative staff sure sure you know by and large on a personal level i think i was treated very well clerks and and paralegals the judicial assistant are really great people they're there to serve by and large but unfortunately there's you know they're very limited in what they can do they're sharply restricted and providing legal aid by anyone in the system and of course that's what litigant all the way to in rage when you actually did something unexpected or that was affected so that you know that was always something to watch out for many of us feel intimidated by opposing lawyers and and that's something that you just have to get used to judges i think we're bringing you for the most part they were curious when you think to have a grasp of the law but there's also been some hostility in particular when you were able to show them case law you know appellate opinions that vary from the way they wanted to rule they could be a little edgy there so you know the the important thing is this not to be intimidated by that just go there to represent yourself regardless of the the personal responses you get it 's interesting because when i was in a situation in the judge the judge's chambers and i there were certain i learned a lot along the way so i was talking about it in what seemed to be a fairly intelligent way and the judge actually seemed to be impressed and said that in front of the adversarial attorney and she went ballistic right there was like a very strong reaction and she really tried to minimize me and kind of cut me out of that it was you know and i thought wow they i think part of what you're up against is this sort of culture well let's face it they say you know lawyers have spent a lot of time training going to school spending a lot of money and so they are you know there is this kind of  tension perhaps between the lawyer and a pro se litigant who you know i'm sure they're thinking who do they think they are right right didn't exactly three years in law school and one hundred thousand dollars more what is there a kind of pivotal moment when you were motivated then to to create courtroom five when you realized you wanted to create a resource right right another great question you know i can't say there was one in particular there's just been doesn't i mean over the years we've seen we've had our own experiences with the courts and we think so many people just harmed by it just treated fairly very unjustly and you know deborah you mentioned earlier co founder and i are relatively privileged you know we've got great academic background we can pick up things and learn very quickly and so we over time learned some things that you know most folks weren't able to pick up you know so easily and that sort of required to do something about the problems we're seeing in the court and you know we again we have academic backgrounds we understood how to teach adults and we had a skill that never discovered about five years ago was dramatically needed there were millions of people flooding the court most without lawyers and they needed some help and we had saying that up close and so we decided we had to get in there and use our backgrounds and our privilege to do something about it well you know and we share i'm not from academia but certainly my profession is as a writer and communicator and i was you know so i had at least that little bit of an id advantage in terms of figuring out how to write a brief and how to present you know but i didn't really wonder a great deal about people you know who just this is not in their wheel house and you know how how did they even begin right i don't think they accepted head except hand written briefs right you know you have to know how to write and edit and get things done and present it you know in a certain way exaggerate i'd like you to explain that some of the resorts is that you make available on courtroom five and i think thanks for that question you know we really wanted to build a a service that would have helped the early on it's a tremendous learning curve i mean anybody if you take you know if you've got a couple of years to learn the law and learn the civil procedure the legal resource deal anybody can do well but that's not the reality we face in court and we have to go to court or you're dragged into court there's a least in a very quick period of time so that even if they didn't necessarily understand all of the you know the i's dotted and the t s crossed they could at least perform better in court in the short term and so what we've got is a set of mitigation tools very similar to the case management tools that lawyers use for all of their cases so there are there's a library of the most common documents templates that you might just walk you through how to create a motion to dismiss how to deal with summary judgment how to write a complaint or answer you know that sort of thing very quickly there are also legal research tools so that you can find the appellate cases or statutes of whatever legal authorities you need to support your position there are tools for maintaining the record of the case or managing your evidence or just staying on track with the very fast as well that you're going to have to do tolls for i mentioned evidence tools for expenses and this really everything you would need to manage a litigation project but then top of that there's a suite of on animated video courses on various litigation topics so that people can on then the flow of litigation what counts eight there's a great course on civil procedure so that you don't actually have to grow go and read the five hundred pages and your state's rules there are courses on how to do legal research you know if you type anything into a legal research database you're going to get six or seven thousand opinions you don't want to read all of that and so there are some tricks that we that we can teach our folks and how to find the right sources so that you can support your opinions many other things we do  workshops to train our folks live on how to manage their litigation so we can do q and a there and there's also a wide open pro se community so that folks can come and get period by some folks that are more experienced than they are that is so fantastic i mean my hat's off to you this is this is going to be is and going to be an incredible resource and service you know you touched upon it earlier  it can be such a kind of an alienated or lonely it's exactly and it is to have this kind of support and have i think even you know building the community is fantastic so it is it is it is gotten to be so important and what we do as you mentioned that we wanted to provide initially as a way to this provided by for folks from other members we don't give legal advice none of us  lawyers right you know but we can share what we've learned and what we would do in similar experiences and so i remember start with use that but others just come to share what's gone on in court that day or what the opposing lawyer has done and we found that to be the critical resource for many of our members as well right what what would you most like to i know that there's so much that you can share and you're sharing it via this web site and what you're offering but it what are some top line what would you most like to convey to pro se litigants if you could give one or two really important pieces of advice that they may never think of at the outset absolutely come to court room were really low cost alternative we can't replace you're getting a lawyer if that's what you need should definitely do that but we do it if that's not an option for you or you just want to go along go it alone come in take a look at court the very cost effective option but in addition to that the two pieces of information i give to anyone are if you're going to be in court without a lawyer learns the whole procedure you're not in judge judy's court you're not going to go and have a judge just listen to both sides and make a decision based on just that the courts don't provide justice they provide process and that process is defined in the civil procedure so if you don't understand civil procedure you're really wasting your time you're not going to get a fair hearing if you're gay and then secondly learn learn legal research the decisions that we see coming down from judges may think arbitrary but they're not there at least they're attempts to make them based on the law and that law is largely defined in the case law that governs your jurisdiction but you've got to find out what that law is and to support the positions you want to say you've got to find the law but because you can oftentimes change a judge it's mine by presenting the case law that you found or your position those civil procedure case law and come to courtroom five so that we can accelerate that process for you i think that is the biggest lesson you know i think a lot of people and certainly i did in my experience i thought well i'm just going to go in and tell the truth and lay out the facts and the you know the truth will set us free it will be so obvious and then you are hit with all kinds of sort of rules and regulations that might cancel out what you said or what you  present so people really do have to disabuse themselves of the the idea that they can just go in and tell their story as you said like in judge judy right it's not t v that's for sure  any thoughts on how and i'm sure you've got a thousand thoughts on how our legal system or our court system could be better  access to those who are self represented sure sure you're right i probably do that not to live but come up with a lot of a lot of things you know i'd like to see court reporting in every courtroom  mandatory i know that some states do offer that california i think got new jersey there may provide a court reporter and civil case as many other states are not and it really professionalize is the courtroom experience when you have a court reporter available when it's being reported and the judge knows that what they say and how they rolled can be is being transcribing can be taken to an appellate court that's probably the most important thing i'd also like to see language interpreters provided in every courtroom we have so many people for whom english is not you know their first language and there are things in the you know in the law that mean different things in english than you might commonly so we need to have some language interpreters for those who need it in the court beyond that i'd like to see better training and supervision of trial court judges we saw a terrible terrible cases all the time but most recently a florida judge really abused a woman in a wheelchair and mind you this was on camera you know she says resign and the judge says but just you know here is here you've got a litigant in front of you who can barely breathe and she's just haranguing and parading this woman for not rushing through her procedure and it was horrible the the woman unfortunately died a couple days later so it's just a really horrible case but you know we see judge going wild in some cases and there's not sufficient training of them in just how to keep your cool you know sure you've had a long day but these are people who need some justice are coming to court for justice and expect a certain decorum from the judges and so i'd like to see a lot more supervision of them at the trial court level i guess most the most important thing though would be to have judges ensure that everyone every litigant in front of them understands the standards for the procedure that they're involved in so if you go and you're arguing a motion to dismiss you shouldn't you shouldn't be there without having the court ensure that you understand what counts and what you  know and that's something that seems like a simple thing to do i know we all understand the course of design for lawyers they're built for lawyers and you expect lawyers to come with that knowledge but these days the vast majority of the people coming to court are not lawyers and so it's not very you know it's not too much to ask that the court to step up a little bit closer to assisting pro se litigants by just making sure we all understand the great stage is that we're facing well it's just you know one of the ridge reasons i was inspired to produce pro se nation is again because of my experience and everything that i encountered over really years of this particular litigation and one of the things i read along the way and actually i'd love to have a program and show just about this the plain language movement like the do you know anything about that where that's at now what not i don't i haven't kept up with it on but i'm familiar with it from history but i haven't i don't know the current status but that's one of the again you know basic things that we should ask of the courts it's not very difficult again we've got a court system that's the bell up from old english law designed for lawyers who are experienced you know gone to graduate school to learn this and they are not the typical litigant orginally you know most judges are having to deal with folks like you and i who have to learn this technical legal language and all these procedures and so plain language is necessary it's not too much to ask in the modern court this right and also one of the things and i don't know whether this has changed across the board i would imagine it would but as a what i encountered as a pro se litigant i could not file electronically everything had to be done by paper and oh my god  i think the most daunting thing to get used to were the deadlines i mean you miss those deadlines you're done you know yeah it's not a fuzzy deadline it's you know are and back the clock is ticking and you know if you're having trouble printing your documents or can't i mean i literally raced to the courthouse with my documents carrying a box you know carrying my briefs whatever again it's these things that you know i think a lot of people and you can't blame them you know we know a lot about or we think we know a lot about the law from watching t v and film  and so you have a very it's likely that you're going to have a very unrealistic view of how it really plays out that's what we've seen that's certainly what we see from our members in fact one of the first workshops that we have for our new members is an hourly workshop on a sunday early evening called not judge judy's court the realities of litigation and it's it is critical because they can't you know it's so important to get rid of the v image of what court's going to be like that you know you're not really motivated to learn civil procedure or you know learn all the other necessities of litigation if you've got judge judy courtroom in mind and simply not like that you're absolutely right about the time schedules that there are hard i mean many state courts there's some flexibility but you can count on it it's discretionary with judges but in the federal and the federal system there's none whatsoever and many judg can because if there is a day for instance where something is due well that day ends at midnight rather than when the courthouse closes and so it's very important to be able to file electronically where you can and just hope you don't have a power outage right which are very common here in new jersey and there where i i think one of the biggest lessons that i learned very quickly is that  you really have to take all of the rules and very seriously if you want to be taken seriously and you can't think that because you're pro se because yourself represented that they're going to you know cut you some slack because it's just not us unfortunately that's true i mean we see so many pro se litigants going to court having heard about the  that seriously they will tell you i know you don't have a lawyer but you have to follow the rules of this court and you've got and you've got to take that seriously you really do you are it helps to at least the same standard that the lawyers are many times lawyers know how to get have any final thoughts you want to share i've followed you for a while married and i really appreciate the work that you're doing i think it's so important that we get more attention on the crisis and processing that occasion you know there are still many of problem i really appreciate what you've done bringing your experience with the court to shine some light on this problem this really appreciate that well and i appreciate what you're doing truly