Family Attorney

There are no objections, no suits and, most importantly, no lawyers.

At the after-hours, do-it-yourself divorce court here each Wednesday, there are just ex-wives, ex-husbands and a no-nonsense judge shuffling handwritten motions in triplicate, sorting through the messy details.

‘’There’s always that residual bitterness between formerly married people, and sometimes that surfaces,'’ Judge Steven Sullivan of Kane County Family Court said after dealing with 15 ex-couples in two hours. ‘’The parties who appear here try to act professionally, but sometimes they’re confused. We tend to allow more leeway.'’

The special Wednesday evening sessions of family court, which began in November, are reserved for people representing themselves in divorces and related custody matters, apparently the first such program in the nation. The laws are the same, as is the judge’s authority, but the atmosphere is far more casual, with judges slowly walking litigants through the basic rules of evidence.

The weekly docket call here in this suburb 40 miles west of Chicago is filled largely with uncomplicated post-divorce paperwork, and simple, uncontested cases of couples without children and little to fight over. A laid-off man asks to cut his alimony. A woman seeks some of her ex-husband’s pension. Children have left home, so the support budget needs to be adjusted.

Kane County’s lawyer-free zone is part of a nationwide ‘’pro se'’ movement – a Latin term roughly meaning ‘’for one’s self'’ – that has flourished in the last decade, with books, Web sites and self-help court clinics proliferating, particularly in the realm of family law. As divorce has become less complicated and more common, many people have shunned the expense and hassle of hiring counsel, instead taking cues from televised trials and downloading legal forms and low-budget advice.

But the influx of pro se litigants has proven awkward in courtrooms across the country, with on-the-clock professionals and uneducated novices sharing the same bench.

Mindful of that friction, F. Keith Brown, the presiding judge of the family court here, decided to offer the special pro se sessions, and took the extra step of scheduling them at 4:30 p.m., so litigants, often sparring over spare dollars, would miss little time at work.

‘’A lot of it is the sense of rugged individualism,'’ said Jona Goldschmidt, a professor of criminal justice at Loyola University in Chicago who wrote a guide on pro se litigation for judges and court clerks. ‘’Much of the practice of law in these garden-variety types of cases is a matter of filling out forms. People see attorneys do that and think, ‘Well, I can do that, too.’ ‘’

But William Hornsby of the American Bar Association said do-it-yourself divorce has its risks. ‘’Even though pro se litigants in family law are sometimes highly satisfied with the results,'’ he said, ‘’if we scrutinize it, we find they didn’t understand the dimensions of taxes, didn’t understand the dimensions of pension interest, didn’t understand child support, and may have done better if they had invested in a lawyer.'’

The United States Supreme Court affirmed the constitutional right of individuals to represent themselves in a 1975 case, Faretta v. California. The pro se movement took off in the mid-1990’s, led by Maricopa County, Ariz., which opened a self-service center seven years ago providing 400 forms for novices, along with a 24-hour hotline to provide assistance.

Similar clinics that help non-lawyers wade through law books and write motions have sprouted in Maine, Montana, New Mexico, Idaho, Florida, Connecticut and California. A national survey by the American Judicature Society, a Chicago-based legal group, found that in some jurisdictions, more than half the divorce cases, and as many as 90 percent, involved at least one pro se party.

What is different about Kane County is that these pro se litigants have a courtroom of their own. Each Wednesday as the sun sets, people in jeans carry accordion files into the courthouse. They lean casually against Judge Sullivan’s bench, listening as though to a schoolteacher, in an atmosphere more from ‘’People’s Court'’ than ‘’The Practice.'’

More : query.nytimes.com