Pro se portal filing to begin in the new year
Pro se portal filing to begin in the new year
Small claims, landlord/tenant, and dissolution without children or property offered initially
Senior Editor
Allowing pro se litigants to use software on the court system’s statewide e-filing portal to prepare and file documents is one step closer to reality following action by the Florida Courts Technology Commission.
Deputy State Courts Administrator Blan Teagle reported that the Supreme Court’s Judicial Management Council, the court’s Family Law Forms Workgroup, various Bar committees and sections, and judges have been working on questionnaires to help self-represented litigants.
The initial questions are aimed at small claims statement of claim, landlord/tenant eviction cases, and simplified dissolution without children or property.
The process “will take information from litigants and populate already approved Supreme Court forms,” said FCTC Chair Judge Lisa Munyon. “It will not create new forms; it will populate only Supreme Court approved forms.”
Palm Beach County Clerk of Court and FCTC member Sharon Bock said the novel aspect of the process is the TurboTax-style software will be built into the portal that handles all filing of documents for the court system. That means one-stop shopping for pro se parties who can assemble and file their documents at one place.
“By housing them in the portal, they will be seamlessly filed,” she said. “If this is launched correctly, and it’s easy for the pro se litigant or anyone to find the form, then we will have created in Florida something that is nowhere else in the United States. And that is a Supreme Court form that will be interactively filled out to allow a pro se litigant who can’t hire a lawyer to have a form that is ready for the judge and have it filed seamlessly, all in one action.”
Bock said what might seem to be an intuitive assumption about pro se filers — that they would have more problems than lawyers — is apparently false. Pro se parties have been approved to file through the statewide portal for about two years. Although there has been no formal effort to publicize that, about 25,000 nonlawyers have registered with the portal and have made more than 66,000 filings, with a monthly growth rate of around 13 percent.
The error rate for pro se filers has been around 1.2 percent, comparted to about 2 percent for attorney filers.
“Will pro se users really be able to understand the interactive forms and understand the portal? I think this shows the answer is an overwhelming ‘yes,’” Bock said.
She moved that once the forms have been vetted by the JMC that they be placed on the statewide portal’s test site for review by interested parties, including lawyers, for 60 days and then submitted to the Supreme Court for final approval.
Teagle noted that for the family law forms, the process involves a review by the family law forms workgroup, judges, and nonattorneys before submission to the court. He said the various Bar groups involved in the small claims and landlord/tenant forms, which include the Small Claims Court Rules Committee, the Consumer Protection Law Committee, and the Public Interest Law Section, would review the landlord/tenant and small claims questions.
The commission eventually approved a three-part motion: that the document assembly questions be posted on the portal’s test site for no more than 60 days before the feedback results are compiled and submitted to the court; that the approval process be changed so that the final recommendation to the court comes from the FCTC instead of the groups that prepared the forms and questions; and that the approval be submitted to the court as an administrative matter instead of a formal case, which will speed the court’s action.
Bock also made a follow-up motion that the landlord/tenant process be allowed to be submitted for approval with only questions for building a complaint, since 70 percent of those cases now never get a reply and result in a default judgment. She said work is ongoing on a response form. She noted the document assembly questions for the complaint have been on the portal test site for 17 months.
Commission members noted there is no current Supreme Court-approved form for responding to an eviction claim. Teagle said work is ongoing to prepare questions to allow a response, and those are expected to be finished by the end of the year.
He said the JMC and Bar groups working on the document assembly process have taken the approach that the family law, landlord/tenant, and small claims process should not be released until there are both complaint and response questions and forms.
But Munyon said it could take a year and a half to get a form approved by the Supreme Court for the response, and she noted there is also no response process for the small claims document assembly software.
Bock said many circuits have developed their own forms to make up for the lack of Supreme Court-approved forms. Other commission members said it is important that there be a perception of fairness in the process, and so it should include, as quickly as possible, a process for responses to complaints.
Bock’s motion eventually passed with some dissent.
