Slashdot Mirror
UK Judge Calls For An Online Court Without Lawyers To Cut Costs
mi writes from a report via The Times: A senior judge has called for the establishment of an online court (Warning: source may be paywalled) that does not have lawyers and can deal with claims of up to 25,000 British Pound (around $32,850). The proposal is the centerpiece of a package of reforms to the civil justice system, drawn up by Lord Justice Briggs, a Court of Appeal judge. Just how exactly will this court ensure no one is, in fact, a trained professional on the internet, where no one knows who you really are, is not explained. We discussed the idea last year. Apparently, it is still alive. The judge's report says this computer court would provide "effective access to justice without having to incur the disproportionate cost of using lawyers." The Law Gazette reported earlier in June that Briggs has mused about a three-stage process -- triage, conciliation and final judgement -- in which there might be some lawyer involvement.
eggs are expensive
His computer decided to upgrade to Windows 10 between the letters a and y.
effective access to justice without having to incur the disproportionate cost of using [lawyers]
That makes as much sense as assuming that effective software can be developed without incurring the cost of using software engineers.
The purpose of lawyers is to level the battlefield. A person who does not understand the law well deserves to have his case presented just as competently as a person who's very knowledgeable about the law. Without lawyers, the result would be total domination by those who happen to be smarter about the law -- resulting in a horribly unfair system that would be easily subject to abuse by the unscrupulous.
Or his Windows auto-correct really blows?
None of it matters. Your laws and stepping over somebody else's lines can all suck a fat dick.
Jesus is coming.
Just hand it over to Sharia courts; they'll do it for free. Gonna happen soon enough anyway. You Brits are fucked.
hmmmm. Service and consent seem like a big issue. Should be "No corporate planitiffs", natural citizens only. I certainly don't want any more billing scams, like in the US with real companies trying to bill and sue fro anything with mystery meat fees or zombie uncancelled, -able services, or Canadian lawyers on the make.
It's almost always more expensive and damaging than any settlement or plea bargain you might reach.
Just how exactly will this court ensure no one is, in fact, a trained professional on the internet, where no one knows who you really are, is not explained.
Now that's a jump in logic you can only see in slashdot summaries! "Minimal help from lawyers " equals minimal cost, not a denial of lawyers. How could lawyers get their share of low cost justice then?
This is the UK. Just do away with trials altogether. We peasants are subjects of her majesty the Queen and should trust in her benevelont judgment.
Here in the uk it already exists in the form of the small claims court, and one can initiate it online, all the judge is really suggesting is changing the charging structure for the court fees (one can currently claim upto £100,000 via the process, but above £10,000 the fee is a percentage of the claim) and he is suggesting moving the actual hearings away from a court room and onto video conferencing instead. Oh, the whole no lawyers thing is total baloney, to become a judge one has to have been a barrister for several years, so at some point if it gets that far...
Plea bargains are only for criminal cases. This is about civil cases. And there are plenty of people who successfully represent themselves in both criminal and civil cases.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Replace the judge with a neural network ensemble trained on past cases and outcomes. I wouldn't be too surprised if it judged better than many human judges.
It is, after all, the last day he can do it for free.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Can lawyers be a party to a suit in such a court? That is, can a lawyer represent himself as a plaintiff or defendant, or will he have to come up with a non-lawyer to represent him?
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
it's just that a whole lot more of them will be judges.
-Legal.Troll (dodging shameful -1 Karma)
For cases in which a large amount is at stake, paying the cost of a good professional makes sense. Just like getting a highly competent and well trained software programmer IF your business depends upon the software.
For small claims, and little scripts you use at home, the cost of a professional who is both well trained and actually good at what they do may not be justified.
If you're involved in a law suit for $250,000 or you are making your business database avaiable via the web (where hackers abound), hire the right professional. Last week I thought I might have to file suit for $4,500. It wouldn't have made sense to spend $2,000 on an attorney in order to increase may chance of winning by 15%.
Lawyers don't even believe in representing themselves, so when you say plenty just what is that percentage ?
Here's an example of what happens when you don't know what you are doing involving the law
http://wtvr.com/2016/06/06/man...
Small claims was exactly what I was thinking. Divorce courts regularly have Lawyers, and are helpful in mediating things like child custody, child support, alimony, and splitting wealth.
There are no courts in the US that require lawyers except perhaps as you mentioned, arguing before a Supreme Court. A person may not be considered competent by a judge and given a Lawyer, but it's rarely necessary. AFAIK you can be a litigator in any court case and not be a Lawyer, but there are rules regarding it (must have a Lawyer present?). Meaning the person pretending to be a Lawyer would have been fine except for the impersonation. It's been a while since I considered law school so that may not be the case in all courts, States, etc..
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Step 1: Virtualize the judiciary system
Step 2: Out-source judiciary decisions to a "Judgement Centre" in India
Well, Doc did say that it would happen by 2015. Close.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Once the constituents figure out that they will be without lawyers, then maybe they will SETTLE their cases out of court like big boys, instead of running to mommy.
Religious nutbags blindly cheering on their leader? Check. Pro rape and and anti women? Check. Views other religious groups and minorities as beneath them? Check. Sounds like the Republicans are bringing Sharia to the U.S. faster than ISIS ever could.
A homeless guy in my town represented himself against the city, took it all the way to the Supreme Court, and won! They ruled that the city can't deny him the right to sell his awful joke books on the sidewalk, because other people are allowed to sell things, and because it is books any subjective determination of merit is inherently content-based. Had he been selling shoes, then the city would be free to decide if it has value to the community; but speech? No, they have to give the permit.
You might misunderstand percentages. In a particular case, you either win or lose; those are 100% or 0% results. Sure it is possible to partly win; but percentages don't matter, those are what happened to other people.
And the reason lawyers don't represent themselves is that they make enough money to hire somebody, it is a tax write-off, and also there is an expectation within the industry to support the industry PR and always hire a lawyer.
Thats Money Claim Online (MCOL), all done online and (as mentioned) up to £100,000, with a starting fee of £25, which can be recovered.
Sounds like what you need is E-Trial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.reddit.com/r/KarmaCourt/
This is for civil small claims cases, in which lawyers are rarely involved and which are largely set up to support people litigating in person.
They tend to be more about arbitration of unpaid invoices or failure to provide a service that's been paid for etc. I have a couple of friends who have used the small claims courts either against non-paying customers or companies that have stiffed them. In all cases they attended in person and were supported by the court staff rather than lawyers, and they all had good things to say about the staff and the system in principal.
These are very much not cases where high paid lawyers square up against each other and slog it out in a dramatic battle of rhetoric. In fact I've heard from a number of people that the judges who preside tend to take a dim view of trained lawyers trying to steamroller or confuse non-lawyers on the other side. These are not cases involving complex points of law. If the case gets more complex then it may be referred to a higher court.
This proposal makes a lot of sense to me for those sorts of cases. While the cost of using the small claims court can put people off using it, the time and disruption, especially if they are running a business, can be more of an impediment. The ability to handle much of the case without having to attend in person would make the whole system much better, and if it reduced the costs it would make the small claims court more accessible to many people to seek redress from companies. There's also lots of potential to design the online system in such a way as to provide lots of help and advice to non-legal people to they can make their case batter, which should also make the whole process more effective and fair.
Paul Leader
A single case does not invalidate parents claim. The reason that (smart) Lawyers don't represent themselves in court is the very same reason that (smart) Personal Trainers hire another PT to train themselves and that is you so easily get "home blind" (sorry don't know if this is a valid expression in English since English is not my first language) and emotionally attached to things that does not matter so that they do miss the things that do matter and thus an external impartial view is very important. Also lawyers specialise in different areas so if you are a criminal courts Lawyer you might not be able to correctly handle a civil courts case at all.
We already have that, busy arbitrating dick tattoos https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Lawyers can be quite useful in catching people in lies. Many lawyers also have reliable investigators who go out in the field and do fact finding. What is important is that the party that loses pays for all the legal and investigation and court fees for both sides. Let the guilty pay for the entire load.
Last time I was put under collection by a local newspaper, I went Willy Wonka on them.
"You REFUSED no less than four requests to cancel! You STOLE $20 off my credit card after repeated contacts to Support to cancel! You CEASED sending the paper after failure to bill the NEXT issue, and now you demand payment for services not rendered! You will remove the debt collection from my credit history, and you GET NOTHING! GOOD DAY, SIR!"
The performance was not your average court performance, but we weren't in court and they folded. I guess they realized I could legitimately get them into *real* court (not small claims) on damage to my credit history, and that I would *win* in less than six seconds, and that the court would have a four-page report regarding their conduct published as an opinion, and probably order them to pay me thousands of dollars in punitive damages for being bastards. It's ridiculous, but that happens when you engage in professional misconduct.
That was, however, several orders of magnitude less complex than any court case I've seen--probably because no sane lawyer would let their client take something like that to court. Jack Thompson might.
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Plea bargains are only for criminal cases. This is about civil cases. And there are plenty of people who successfully represent themselves in both criminal and civil cases.
Its obvious he means an out of court settlement. And he's right.
A day in court almost always costs more, not just in actual damages but also lost productivity. This is why a credible threat of court is so damaging to businesses. The problem is that when one side can afford shyster lawyers and the other cannot that puts them at a severe disadvantage. Some people can successfully represent themselves but 99% of people cant, especially against someone who knows all the loopholes and dirty tricks of the petty court.
That is what this judge is proposing, by eliminating lawyers you get less dirty tricks being used against people who have done nothing wrong. It will also help the backlog of court cases before the petty courts. Lawyers tend to want to drag things out.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Too bad it only works in civil law not common law, because common law is swayed by emotions so very vague.
It's almost always more expensive and damaging than any settlement or plea bargain you might reach.
Taking a case all the way to trial is very rare today; most settle in advance of trial.
For the few cases that do go to trial, they go to trial for different reasons. It often means either that someone has an irrational desire to spend the next two years of their life proving someone else is wrong, or it means that at least one side has evaluated the case incorrectly and is therefore unwilling to settle for a dollar amount the other side considers reasonable.
Real lawyers write in C++
Yey! Veterans Affairs for all!..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The civil equivalent of a "plea bargain" is a settlement. It serves the same purpose and involves the same kind of horse trading.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Right, everybody in an industry is going to recite the party-line answer. A personal trainer isn't going to say, "Gosh, I hire a personal trainer to make it look everybody needs one," they're going to give a PR reason like "blah blah `home blind' blah blah." If they're a professional athlete, I believe them. If they're not, then how "home blind" are they, really? Will they actually get a substandard or even lower quality workout just using their own knowledge? Is athletic training really that much of a Arti'stic thing where you need a live person holding the brush for it to count, or is it actually just a technical job? The part that is non-technical is the part that is cheerleading, and a personal trainer is a person who is already self-motivated to train or they wouldn't even want the job! It is blatantly obvious in that example that it is PR.
You didn't introduce any idea that even argues against what I said, you just seem to have not considered it and you take the time to assert otherwise.
And of course it is the "smart" personal trainers who hire personal trainers... just ask them! It is a pretty obvious part of the PR. Trainers who aren't doing that PR aren't going to agree, "yeah, I'm not very smart, so I don't hire one." Instead they'll say, "I'm self motivated, so I don't need the help. Motivation and safety are the services I provide." The nature of the way one side backhandedly calls the other stupid is related to the arguments; you have to do that with a backhand, so it is asymmetrical; one side calls the other stupid, the other side has to fall back on "different strokes."
My own experience is that I win 100% of the time against bogus criminal accusations, and suing the government. In both cases, the lawyers I had hired said to take the deal. In both cases I said "you're fired." Lawyers are stupid, same as everyone else.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
"loopholes and tricks" are things judges frown upon. Lawyers trying such tactics piss off judges - not a winning strategy.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Actually, I'm pretty sure "home blind" is referring to a type of cognitive bias--I can't say for sure if confirmation bias, observer-expectancy effect, overconfidence effect, selective perception, something else, or a combination of any/all. In the case of our hypothetical personal trainer, what they're doing by hiring another personal trainer is ensuring that their assumptions and beliefs in the effectiveness of their routine for themselves won't blind them to reality--that they've got third-party confirmation that they're doing well.
It also ensures you've a spotter, which is a thing that you can't really do on your own unless you manage to possess multiple physical bodies.
Most lawyers I know probably would consider the situation before deciding if they hire another lawyer--they might arrange for a consult instead (a general sanity check, basically) or just come to the conclusion that hiring a specialist is a better use of their time and money. If it's something pretty clean-cut, though, they might not bother with anything more than maybe an informal consult of 'buy you a drink' sort if they're really cautious before going ahead.
I think that you are one step to much into this whole conspiracy of yours. I happen to know a lot of trainers that also are extremely talented power lifters and they absolutely cannot train themselves due to what I described earlier, and they know this because when they tried they failed miserably. Despite all their knowledge and expertise they could not apply it to themselves.
And I assume that the exact same thing happens with Lawyers, if you consider how competitive the market is you would see that no Lawyer would promote others just for the off chance that they would get more jobs themselves. Ok there might be one or two, no is after all one of those dangerous words.
If you think you found a conspiracy theory, I guess you're reading something other than what I wrote.
Lets just clarify right here that I only meant the words I said. Words I didn't say are not to be assumed, most of the potential words that you could imagine me saying that I didn't say are words I would not in fact have ever said.
Pretend you took a business class at the local community college, and the whole class was about PR for your small business. Right, that's the knowledge level for understanding what I said. Everything I said or implied is consistent with what you would learn in that class. There is absolutely no conspiracy involved. Most, but not all, small business owners will give you a "what I think is going to help my business" type of answer for any question about major topics for their industry. And most of them also read magazines targeted at people who provide the same service as them. And those magazines will have articles like, "Why Every Personal Trainer Has a Personal Trainer (Even If They Don't Really)." It is not a conspiracy. It is just the way business works. Service industries are populated by businesses who take a public position that their service is important to buy, even if you think you can do it yourself instead of hiring them. Is that really a surprise? Do you really need to seek out a conspiracy for that to be true?
Perhaps that is how it works in the US, that I don't know. In my country we don't have the legions of Lawyers that you have in the US since matters and conflicts are not normally decided in court (since I don't live in a common law country) so we have exactly zero bus chasers, tv commercials and so on for Lawers and still Lawyers over here usually hire a Lawyer if they would end up in court for what ever reason.
And with regards to trainers I do train other people myself and I can honestly say that if I ever decide to compete myself then I would most certainly hire someone to coach me and I would not do this because I have been told to do so due to PR reasons. In fact your posts where the very first place I have ever heard of this idea.
Sorry to call this a conspiracy of yours, but it did sound like some kind of conspiracy (they only do it in order to promote their own business and lie about it in order to hide their true meaning). I have no intention to put words in your mouth, that was simply the feeling that I got from your posts.
Perhaps that is how it works in the US, that I don't know. In my country we don't have the legions of Lawyers that you have in the US
So you probably don't even know if we have "legions of lawyers" or if you just were overly credulous. Doesn't "don't know" mean you get to make it up, or just that you don't know? Why not stop typing at "I don't know," since you're clearly not asking any useful question?
Maybe, how many lawyers we have has nothing at all to do with what is a good advertising strategy for a service industry? Why are you letting all these stereotypes about my country interfere with understanding the very very very basic claim that people in service industries tend to claim their service is important?
And BTW, a "personal trainer" is not a trainer that trains people to compete at anything. That is an "athletic trainer." The "personal" in "personal trainer" means that they're just training one person at a time. So if you go to a gym, and there is an employee that can teach you how to use the weight machine, or help you decide how many reps to do of a particular weight, that is a personal trainer. If you're competing at something, you want a something-trainer. Personal trainer means their specialty is helping people that don't know how to train. The idea that a personal trainer would need a personal trainer is laughable, but they will still say it. Very consistently. Because small business people have usually read at least the "101-level" stuff about marketing a service, and that is what they're told is good to say.
What does the situation in the US have to do with anything, if the same thing happens in another country (which don't have the properties that you describe) then we can say with some degree of confidence that the reason that it is happening is the same. There is no need for Lawyers to promote their industry in my country, you cannot hire a private Lawyer at a criminal court here and we have very very few civil cases. That the US have lots of civil cases and that you have lots of bus chasers are hardly stereotypes about the US.
What I meant with "Perhaps that is how it works in US" and "I don't know" was refering to if Lawyers in your country did this only to promote their business and then lying about it, that I cannot know 100%, what I do know is that is not how it works over here so making the assumption that the same rules would apply for the US is not that far fetched but since there could be a slight chance that this was not the case I wrote that particular quote. It had no other meaning or bearing.
Regarding PTs this is a pure semantic rant from your side, exactly what some profession is called was not the point that I was trying to make. But since this seams to be important for you I was speaking about both PTs, Strength Trainers and Team Coaches. And of course a PT would hire another PT, as I said I do coach people myself but I would never coach myself.