Courts that Tax the Poor and Middleclass

You have a dispute with a corporation like ZIPS Car Wash, First American Home Warranty or Portfolio Recovery Group.

The company took money from you that you did not owe, did not provide the service you paid for or tried to extort money from you.

You tried writing “letters”, poor reviews on the internet, and begged by telephone for the company to correct itself. All to no avail.

So, you decide to take them to court.

In my experience, the courts often discourage non-attorneys from filing a suit.

In the small claims division in Faulkner County Arkansas, I filed a suit against Goodman Manufacturing for selling a faulty HVAC to me. The court charged me $12.55 on top of the filing fee, supposedly to serve the suit on Goodman by certified mail.

Eventually, Goodman wrote a motion to dismiss based on improper service and showed a copy of the service envelope with a regular stamp on it. The court is collecting over $10 extra per plaintiff, and if the plaintiff has a good case that concerns a company that has lawyered up, the case can be thrown out on a technicality. (One of the other defendants settled with me, so I know it was a good case.) See the FREE Doc of the Day at the end of the post.

In a case in the Federal District Court of Southern California, five of the defendants were attorneys who were accused of committing malpractice on a company that I was a shareholder in. There were other harms against me claimed in the same lawsuit. The malpractice claim is what is called “derivative”. A derivative suit cannot be filed by a non-attorney. Who knew?

The court allowed me to proceed on the derivative suit and denied me leave to hire an attorney to explain what a derivative suit was unless I hired the attorney to represent me in the entire case. That might have cost more than I would recover. There was no fee shifting provision that would allow me to recover the costs of the lawsuit.

When I discovered on my own that by proceeding on the derivative suit I might be charged with practicing law without a license, I brought it to the Court’s attention as a voluntary dismissal. Judge Sammartino decided that I dismissed because the attorneys were going to prevail and ordered me to pay their attorney fees on an anti-SLAPP motion. Never mind that malpractice and conversion claims are not subject to the fee shifting anti-SLAPP statute.

In the Federal Court in the Eastern District of Arkansas, there are conflicting rules about non-attorneys using electronic filing. One says non-attorneys cannot use electronic filing. Period. That is the rule Judge Lee P. Rudofsky enforced against me. There is another rule that says a person can gain permission to use electronic filing by filing a motion. I tried that, to no avail.

“Conventional” paper filing taxes the pro se litigant. Instead of filing whenever convenient, the non-attorney must drive to the courthouse during business hours or mail the documents and cross her fingers.

I went into an important hearing on the case once and learned that my adversary’s attorneys received an order by electronic service the day before that I did not get in the mail yet. They had an opportunity to research the law before we discussed it, and I did not.

Each of the approximately 100 documents I filed in the case cost me about $100 extra to copy four times and using the GSA mileage expense to drive to the courthouse and home. That is $10,000 I could not spend on discovery, like depositions and subpoenas. I have an autoimmune disease and was forced to go into public to file. (Once I went to the courthouse on the last day to file. I was feeling a little more lousy than usual, so I went to an urgent care after and found out I had COVID. If I had electronic filing, I would not have exposed others to the disease.)

What can be done about this taxation of the poor and middleclass that can’t afford to pay an attorney hundreds of dollars an hour for representation?

It will probably take a Constitutional challenge to the laws that discriminate against the majority class. Where judges like Janis L. Sammartino, Lee P. Rudofsky or the Clerk of the Court are misapplying the law or ignoring the law, it means filing an appeal and prevailing.

Good luck.

If you have a story about systemic bias in the courts, please shoot an email to bohemian_books@yahoo.com.

Doc of the Day