A new report on the experience of self-represented litigants in summary judgment motions has at least one law professor concerned about unfairness to those unfamiliar with the process.
“They’re pushing on an open door because they know there’s already a bias here,” says University of Windsor Faculty of Law professor Julie Macfarlane of the growing use of summary judgment motions by lawyers acting against unrepresented parties.
Today, the National Self-represented Litigants project released a report on the experience of self-represented litigants in regards to summary judgment motions brought in their cases.
Working with Katrina Trask and Erin Chesney, Macfarlane, who’s director of the project, compared the results of summary judgment motions involving self-represented parties in both 2004 and 2014, the year in which the Supreme Court of Canada released its landmark decision in Hryniak v. Mauldin.
In 2004, the researchers found five cases across Canada involving a summary judgment motion with a self-represented party. By 2014, the number of cases had increased to 61.
All but four of the 2014 cases involved a motion brought by a party with counsel. The success rate of the motions was 96 per cent, a number Macfarlane calls “extraordinary.”
“There is a risk here, and the risk is what we’re trying to report on,” she says.
She cites a concern that parties with counsel are using summary judgments as a tactic against those unfamiliar with the system and who are “completely confused.”
“We need to be more sensitive to the fact that people make mistakes,” says Macfarlane.
“The much deeper problem is a lot of people who are in a legal process now are not managing what they need to do in order to represent themselves properly,” she adds.
The success rate for summary judgment motions was similar even after removing cases in which there were findings that the unrepresented party had been vexatious.
The researchers also looked at Ontario-specific data involving motions under rules 20 and 21 of the Rules of Civil Procedure. Using those criteria, the number of cases involving unrepresented parties was four in 2004 with three of them brought by people with counsel. By 2014, there were 13 such motions with 88 per cent of those brought by represented parties having been successful.
Given the numbers, Macfarlane is calling for some assistance to help unrepresented litigants respond to summary judgment motions.
“In some of these cases, they had literally left off a comma,” she says, raising a concern about access to justice for those without counsel.
Part of Macfarlane’s concern is around judges’ attitudes and potential bias given what she says is their understandable difficulty in dealing with unrepresented parties. But, she adds, it’s unfair to hold such litigants to the same standards as lawyers.
And with several courts considering new summary judgment procedures in light of Hryniak, Macfarlane is urging caution.
“We have to be careful about how we put those new procedures together,” she says.
