The old line, a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client has a lot of truth.
I frequently meet people who, for good or bad reasons, act for themselves in court. Almost always this leads to disaster. There are serious issues of distance -- it's hard to be objective about your own case -- but more non lawyers don't have a "feel" for the law.
What do I mean by that?
Well, there are arguments and positions that seem plausible, and may have some statute or case law to back them us, but which are simply hopeless. But self represented parties, seeing the arguments and being blinded by their emotions, argue cases and lose and are often thereby ruined.
What can be done? Perhaps not much -- if the self represented is acting because of a lack of money then perhaps a better legal aid system could help. If, by contrast, and as is common enough, the party is self represented because of a belief they are better than any lawyer there is no hope.
James Morton
1100 - 5255 Yonge Street
Toronto, Ontario
M2N 6P4
2 comments:
James, from what I've seen, self-represented lawyers don't do all that much better than self-represented lay litigants.
Actually, I have seen some quite successful pro se litigants. They usually tend to be engineers, as they have a similar way of thinking toward a problem as lawyers do.
One of them that I once knew did very well in a labour case, when he was up against a celebrated football commentator and IP lawyer who thought he was also a labour specialist. The engineer sacked him pretty bad at the OCA.
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