Representing yourself in court can be a tricky endeavor. There are confusing legal terms to learn, strict procedures to follow and volumes of case law that often need to be understood to prepare a case. Lake County officials and a private agency that assists indigent litigants in Illinois want to make the practice easier by creating a self-help center for people who choose to represent themselves in legal matters. The center, which will be housed in the law library at the main courthouse in Waukegan, could open later this summer. "I think it's going to be extremely helpful," Court Administrator Bob Zastany said. "There is a population out there that will take advantage of this resource." The self-help center will be the only one of its kind in the county. Only a few operate nationwide, officials said. The project is the work of Lake County circuit court officials and Prairie State Legal Services, a statewide agency with an office in Waukegan that provides information and legal assistance to poor and elderly Illinois residents. The organization has received a $25,000 grant from the Illinois Equal Justice Foundation, a nonprofit group that funds programs designed to increase access to legal information and assistance, to help pay for the effort. Prairie State will share the money with the county. The county's law library is on the first floor of the governmental center at 18 N. County St. The new self-help center will be designed to help litigants find the information they need to properly represent themselves in court, an undertaking that can be complicated and confusing. "Some people can do OK on their own, and some people can do OK with some help," said Linda Rothnagel, the managing attorney for Prairie State Legal Services. "But other people can't do it. It's not always easy." Self-representation is a right affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The practice is far more common in civil matters than in criminal cases. In fact, self-represented litigants - formally called "pro se" in Latin, or "for oneself" - in criminal defenses are so rare that statistics about the practice generally are not kept, legal experts say.

Question: "How is the center being created?"

OPTIONS:
- no
- yes

Answer: "With a $30,000 grant from Lake County"

Response: no

How would the universe look without gravity? It would have no planets and no stars. Thats how it looked when it was young. When the universe was young, there was only gas and dust. From this gas and dust, everything we now see was made. How were stars and planets created from just gas and dust? The answer is gravity. The same gravity that holds you down on Earth. The same force that causes your pencil to roll off your desk. The same force that causes it to fall to the floor. The invisible force of gravity caused dust and gas particles to be pulled together. This force is what formed all the objects in our solar system. This force formed the smallest moons. It also formed our Sun. This force caused more than just our solar system to form. It caused all the other solar systems to form. It caused the formation of all the galaxies of the universe.

Question: "What force causes pencils to roll off your desk and fall to the floor?"

Response: "Gravity"
OPTIONS:
- no
- yes

A: yes

Problem: Howland talked but little on their way back to camp. The scene that he had just witnessed affected him strangely; it stirred once more within him all of his old ambition, all of his old enthusiasm, and yet neither found voice in words. He was glad when the dinner was over at Thorne's, and with the going of the mail sledge and the senior engineer there came over him a still deeper sense of joy. Now _he_ was in charge, it was _his_ road from that hour on. He crushed MacDonald's hand in a grip that meant more than words when they parted. In his own cabin he threw off his coat and hat, lighted his pipe, and tried to realize just what this all meant for him. He was in charge--in charge of the greatest railroad building job on earth--_he_, Jack Howland, who less than twenty years ago was a barefooted, half-starved urchin peddling papers in the streets where he was now famous! And now what was this black thing that had come up to threaten his chances just as he had about won his great fight? He clenched his hands as he thought again of what had already happened--the cowardly attempt on his life, the warnings, and his blood boiled to fever heat. That night--after he had seen Meleese--he would know what to do. But he would not be driven away, as Gregson and Thorne had been driven. He was determined on that.

Question: "Whose feelings of ambition were stirred by the previous scene? Give first and last name."

Answer: "Jack Howland"

OPTIONS:
- no
- yes
Answer: yes

Life for the partners of Cates, Katalinic & Lund holds little of the glamour one might expect from a career in law. Instead of lunches at Lutce, they caucus at the Palace Diner in Queens. Wooing clients means passing out fliers on street corners, not securing box seats at Madison Square Garden. To make ends meet, one partner stacks pipe and cleans the yard at a plumbing warehouse. Another handles urine samples in a hospital lab. A sign of failure, of a feeble economy, perhaps? Hardly. They are heeding the call of a growing pool of law schools, which are for the first time pointing graduates in a new direction and teaching them how to get there. Forget the lure of large firms, the security of a government post. Here is how to grapple "in the service of justice," as many of the schools put it, instead. Convinced that corporate largess and government programs barely dent the nation's legal needs, the law schools are urging graduates to buck tradition, pass up big salaries and ignore mushrooming student debt to join tiny neighborhood practices or simply start their own, all with an eye toward charging no more than their clients can afford. This is not pro bono legal work; it is "low bono," a term the schools coined to define the atypical kind of law career they are training students for. While its practitioners do charge for their services, they are also dead set on turning no one away - or at least as few as possible. "When you go into this kind of social justice law, it's really brutal and you're almost guaranteed to struggle for a couple of years before there's a light at the end of the tunnel," said Fred Rooney, director of the Community Legal Resource Network at City University of New York School of Law, from which the lawyers of the newly formed Cates, Katalinic & Lund graduated last May. "But if our graduates don't do it, the millions of people who cannot access justice in this country will continue to soar." The movement, primly called the consortium, started four years ago by CUNY, Northeastern University, the University of Maryland and St. Mary's Law School in Texas. (St. Mary's later dropped out.) Since then, it has drawn seven additional law schools to its ranks: the University of Michigan, Rutgers and Syracuse Law Schools, New York Law School, University of New Mexico School of Law, Thomas M. Cooley Law School and Touro Law School. It has elicited at least initial interest from 19 more.

Question: "Do the lawyers practicing "low bono" work struggle and take side jobs?"

OPTIONS:
- no
- yes

Answer: "They charge large fees and live comfortably"

Response:
no