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Before becoming a neutral, I dedicated my legal career to serving the public interest.  This oftentimes meant bringing access to justice to underserved populations, namely low-income and often marginalized individuals.  One aspect of my work involved running consumer debt court programs to assist pro se litigants by using limited representation, a legal tool created under the auspices of unbundled legal services.  Limited representation is often a foreign idea to many attorneys who use traditional retainer agreements and provide ongoing legal services to clients.  If legal services are unbundled, that is parsed out, then an attorney can assist many more litigants than he/she otherwise would have the capacity to serve.  I provided a certain set of finite services (court room representation) for a finite amount of time (that day only).  If I represented the same client on multiple occasions then a new retainer agreement was signed each time and a new Notice of Appearance was filed with the court each day.  Once the client left the courtroom, I was no longer his/her attorney.

Limited representation-type programs were created to address an unmet need: serving mass quantities of pro se litigants.  In fact, 98-99% of defendants in consumer debt cases are pro se.  Advocates brought this issue to the attention of New York City’s Chief Administrative Judges who in turn acknowledged this need and then created and funded limited representation programs.  Through these programs and on a limited representation basis, I worked with thousands of pro se litigants.  Thousands.  For many pro se litigants, stepping inside the Brooklyn Civil Court is a daunting event: it is crowded, too hot or too cold, and noisy.  It is a microcosm of the borough - people of all races, ages and walks of life.  For many of my pro se clients, it was their first time stepping inside of a courtroom.  Many did not understand why they were being sued (or they had no relationship with the entity who was suing them) and they could not decipher the legal jargon that brought them there.  My job was to help these litigants navigate this foreign experience.  I became very comfortable with intentionally avoiding legal-ese and using words that a lay person can understand to describe the court process and associated paperwork.  It was not a dispositive motion; rather, it was a request for the court to take an action (motion) that ends the case (dispositive) in the other party’s favor.  To be honest, it seems haughty to me to talk to someone using language that you know they are likely not able to understand.  If you know someone does not speak French then why would you speak to them in French?  It is simply one more way to make a non-attorney feel incompetent in a legal setting.

Now, as a neutral, while I no longer advocate for pro se litigants, I do make sure that they understand the process of arbitration and the language of the discussion.  I take the time to explain what things like “dispositive motions” are and I offer opportunities for them (as well as the represented party) to ask questions.  I also tweak the language of the Scheduling Orders so that a pro se party has a clear understanding of what is expected of them.  For example, I do not use the language “Claimant” and “Respondent” – I use the party’s actual names – John Doe must file all documents by DATE.  I do not exclusively use the word “discovery” – I provide a parenthetical definition, simply “document exchange.”  When all parties in an arbitration understand every aspect of the process then it becomes a more equitable forum, not to mention a more humane one.  I hope that, no matter the outcome, a pro se party feels that he/she had their “day in court” and that they were treated fairly by their arbitrator.