What My Own Court File Taught Me About Litigants in Person, Silence, and the Modern Justice System

THE MENU SHOULD NOT REQUIRE A LAW DEGREE

What My Own Court File Taught Me About Litigants in Person, Silence, and the Modern Justice System

By Michael P. Lennon Jr.

I spent nearly twenty years in hospitality and almost a decade in funeral service.

Those two trades teach you something quickly: if people cannot understand the process, the process eventually collapses under its own weight.

In kitchens, unclear communication burns people. In funeral service, poor communication breaks trust at the worst possible moment in a family’s life.

And increasingly, I believe the same thing is happening to ordinary people entering the court system without representation.

Not because individual staff do not care. Not because judges are unaware. Not because nobody is trying.

But because the modern system is carrying a type of pressure it was never fully designed for: the rise of the fragmented Litigant in Person.

That phrase sounds neat and administrative. The reality is far messier.

A Litigant in Person is often somebody arriving at court already carrying:

• financial strain
• trauma
• mental-health pressure
• family breakdown
• digital overload
• fragmented paperwork
• confusion around process
• and the emotional exhaustion that comes from trying to keep functioning while your life quietly slides sideways.

The public often imagines self-representation as some brave legal adventure.

It usually is not.

Most people are there because they ran out of options.

I know this because I became one.

My own King’s Bench case eventually evolved into something far bigger than the original dispute itself. The further I moved into the process, the clearer another reality became: the greatest danger was not always the courtroom.

It was the administrative fog surrounding it.

Emails disappearing into silence. No acknowledgement. No clear procedural direction. No visible ownership of the file. No continuity between vulnerability and process.

At some point, communication stops feeling like communication. It starts feeling like absorption.

I described it in correspondence as: “throwing snowflakes into a furnace.”

You send material in. Nothing returns.

Now imagine trying to navigate that while:

• mentally unwell
• financially unstable
• sleep deprived
• overwhelmed
• and representing yourself against institutions that speak a language you were never trained to understand.

This is where modernisation matters.

Not cosmetic modernisation. Not just portals and PDFs.

Operational modernisation.

Because digital systems have improved access while simultaneously increasing fragmentation.

A vulnerable person can now generate:

• thousands of emails
• screenshots
• PDFs
• attachments
• medical letters
• welfare records
• complaints
• applications
• timelines

while becoming progressively less capable of organising any of it coherently.

The result is predictable:

• duplication
• emotional correspondence
• missed deadlines
• procedural confusion
• escalating panic
• administrative overload
• and downstream pressure on already stretched court systems.

The system then spends enormous time reconstructing chronology manually from fragmented human lives.

That is not sustainable.

And truthfully, I do not believe the answer is simply “more legal language.”

Most Litigants in Person do not need a lecture. They need a readable menu.

I wrote exactly that in my complaint correspondence: “If someone comes to my restaurant, they do not need to bring a chef to read the menu. The menu should tell them what is being served and what comes next.”

That line travelled further than I expected because people instantly understood it.

The problem is not intelligence. The problem is cognitive overload inside systems built around procedural fluency.

A person already under pressure stops processing information cleanly. That is not weakness. That is human capacity under strain.

This is where Mindspire Mentor begins to matter.

Not as legal advice. Not as a replacement for solicitors. Not as interference with judicial independence.

But as a continuity framework.

Something upstream.

Something that helps people:

• organise chronology
• separate evidence from emotion
• reduce duplication
• structure communication
• preserve continuity
• identify gaps
• stabilise participation before complete procedural fragmentation occurs.

Because a fragmented person usually produces fragmented process.

That is not criticism. It is operational reality.

The current justice environment increasingly encounters people arriving not with one clean dispute and one tidy folder, but with years of overlapping systems:

• healthcare
• welfare
• employment
• debt
• complaints
• family pressure
• trauma
• digital records
• mental exhaustion

And all of it eventually lands in front of human beings trying to maintain procedural order.

The pressure this creates for administrative staff, judiciary, and vulnerable court users alike is obvious once you stand inside it long enough.

My own correspondence repeatedly returned to one question: Who owned the control point when risk became visible?

That question matters far beyond my own case.

Because modern systems are very good at dividing responsibility horizontally:

• judicial
• administrative
• executive
• procedural
• technical

But vulnerable people experience the system vertically. As one reality.

They do not experience “departments.” They experience consequences.

That is why continuity matters.

A person in distress does not usually collapse because of one dramatic event. They collapse because small failures accumulate:

• unanswered communication
• delayed acknowledgement
• procedural uncertainty
• administrative silence
• fragmented records
• growing fear
• growing avoidance
• growing exhaustion

Until eventually the system no longer feels navigable at all.

That is The Gap.

The space between:

• access and understanding
• procedure and participation
• containment and recovery
• communication and comprehension

The difficult truth is this: many Litigants in Person are not failing because they are unwilling to engage.

They are failing because the modern administrative burden increasingly assumes levels of emotional stability, organisational ability, and procedural literacy that distressed human beings often no longer possess.

That is not an accusation. It is a structural observation.

And if systems are going to modernise properly over the next decade, they will need to modernise around human capacity — not just digital capability.

Because the future challenge is no longer simply: “Can people access the courts?”

It is: “Can overwhelmed people still participate coherently once they get there?”

That is the question underneath all of this.

And I suspect it is going to matter more and more in the years ahead.

Michael P Lennon

KB Revision: 24/061873 

https://g.dev/MindspireExperience