Nat’l Center for State Courts: 3/4 of civil cases have one unrepresented party
In 2015, the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) released data about how often one side, neither side, or both sides have a lawyer in civil cases. The data, based on a representative sampling of 152 courts in 10 counties across the country examined in 2012-2013 (totaling over 900,000 cases), appeared in the NCSC’s November 2015 Landscape of Civil Litigation of State Courts report. A key finding was that “At least one party was self-represented (usually the defendant) in more than three-quarters of the cases.”
In 2016, NCCRC participant Richard Zorza helpfully reformatted the data into helpful charts in a post on his blog (AccessToJustice.net). Importantly, he noted that the NCSC data does not include “domestic” cases (i.e., family law), which explains why the number of “neither side represented” cases is as low as it is.
