Understanding and supporting legal participation for Litigants in Person

This project builds on previous Nuffield Foundation research on Litigants in Person (LiP) in Northern Ireland, identifying the barriers to legal participation for people going to court without a lawyer and how this can jeopardise their right to a fair trial. This project will develop practical tools for assisting LiP to tackle participation barriers.

The previous Litigants in Person in Northern Ireland research (2018) found LiP face intellectual, practical and emotional barriers to participation in legal proceedings, which could jeopardise their right to a fair trial. While these barriers may exist for all litigants, the research found that litigants in person face an additional attitudinal barrier due to not having legal representation in court. It highlighted the need for cultural change to normalise the presence of LiP in the court system and embed their perspective in reforms to the court process, to tackle attitudinal barriers. It also identified a need for informational materials to support LiP in order to tackle intellectual, practical and emotional barriers. This study will build on the previous project in two stages. The first stage will involve developing a checklist to enable researchers, court actors and judges to determine whether LiP can effectively participate. The second stage will involve using a human-centred design approach to produce support materials for LiP going through family proceedings, to improve empathy and understanding between LiP and court actors.

To develop the checklist, the researchers will use the anonymised data from the original study, focusing on LiP involved in family proceedings. An initial sample of 30-35 will be used to interrogate the interview, questionnaire and observation data to identify indicators of barriers to the seven types of participation identified in the earlier study. These key types of participation will be shaped into a scorable checklist, which will be tested with a second subsample from the original dataset. The researchers will seek expert views on the checklist’s validity from a newly established LiP Design Group. Finally, they will test the checklist with LiP undergoing family proceedings in courts. In the second stage of the research, the user-focussed legal support materials will be developed in collaboration with the LiP Design Group. As well as steering the design of the materials, the group will determine their dissemination and evaluation. LiP who took part in the checklist testing will give feedback on the draft support materials. Through the human-centred design process, Design Group members will keep reflective diaries to help the research team understand how empathy and understanding between groups can be improved in other legal contexts.

COVID-19

As part of their project, the research team are also undertaking a consultation on the impact of COVID-19 on the family courts in Northern Ireland to explore how LiP might be supported through court processes post-lockdown. This work will align with the consultation being conducted by Nuffield’s Family Justice Observatory (Nuffield FJO) in England and Wales.

The consultation seeks to understand the impact of the arrangements necessitated by COVID-19 on the family justice system in Northern Ireland. It will explore the experiences and perceptions of court actors and court users on hearings and arrangements, and will also seek to understand the impact of hearing delays and participation in remote hearings. The work will outline the nature and context of the COVID-19 arrangements that have been made for family courts in Northern Ireland to identify any jurisdictional variations that may be relevant in comparing the findings across the UK. Modelled on the survey tool developed by the Nuffield FJO, an online survey will be carried out in Autumn 2020, with reporting in early 2021. The research team will encourage the participation of practitioners and litigants in the survey, drawing on the networks established in the original research to help reach LiP. In this way, the survey anticipates having a greater emphasis and involvement of LiP compared to other similar exercises (including the Nuffield FJO consultation).

This project will define the descriptors of legal participation and create tools relevant to the COVID-19 landscape to help indicate whether the right to effective participation has been met. It will assess whether human-centred design helps to tackle the attitudinal barriers between court actors and LiP, and will develop more focused judicial training on protecting the rights of LiP. The findings will be disseminated through social and broadcast media and professional networks, with the main public report to be launched at the final project conference in June 2022.