Who represents themselves, and why

It is easy to picture a self-represented litigant as a single type of person, but the research paints a far more varied picture. The National Self-Represented Litigants Project, led by Dr. Julie Macfarlane between 2011 and 2013, interviewed 259 self-represented litigants across Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta. What stood out was the diversity of the group: people of different income levels and different educational backgrounds were all finding themselves in court without counsel.

The study also showed where these litigants were appearing. About 60 percent were involved in family-law matters, the area where self-representation is most visible. Roughly 31 percent were in civil court, split between small claims at about 13 percent and general civil matters at about 18 percent. A smaller share, about 4 percent, were appearing before tribunals.

These numbers matter because they cut against the assumption that people without lawyers are uniformly poorly educated or that they cluster in one narrow part of the system. Self-representation reaches across family courts, civil courts and administrative tribunals, and it touches people who, in other circumstances, might have been expected to retain counsel.

When asked why they were representing themselves, the litigants in the study gave one answer more consistently than any other: they could not afford a lawyer, or they could not afford to keep paying for one. The decision to go it alone was, in the great majority of cases, about money rather than choice.

A striking pattern was that many people did not start out self-represented. They began their case with a lawyer and then ran out of funds partway through, forced to continue on their own once their savings or available credit were exhausted. This means self-representation is often not a single decision made at the outset, but a transition that happens mid-case as costs mount.

Understanding this affordability driver is important for anyone designing services for these litigants. Because cost, not preference, is the engine behind self-representation, the people affected are frequently doing something they would rather not be doing, and they are doing it under financial strain.

There was a time when a person appearing without a lawyer was treated as an unusual case, a departure from the way courts expected to operate. That expectation no longer matches reality in many courtrooms. In a number of family and civil settings, appearing without counsel has become common rather than exceptional.

This shift changes the practical task facing courts and registries. Procedures, forms and counter services that assumed a lawyer would be standing between the court and the litigant now have to work for people who have no such intermediary. The volume of self-represented litigants reshapes how staff spend their time and how hearings unfold.

Recognizing that self-representation is now a normal feature of the system, rather than a rare exception, is the first step toward building a system that serves the people who actually use it. It reframes the question from how to handle the occasional unrepresented person to how to design for a population that includes many of them.

This is research and educational material on who self-represents and why. It is general legal information, not legal advice, and it does not describe any individual's matter.