Law360 Canada (August 28, 2026, 2:59 PM EDT) --

Concillia Muonde

There is a familiar moment in family court.

A self-represented litigant does not know which document to file. A deadline is missed. An affidavit contains argument, evidence and grievance in equal measure. The other lawyer explains that the requested relief is not properly before the court. The judge explains procedure. Court staff explain what they can, and importantly, what they cannot.

Time passes.

Everyone feels it.

It is tempting, in that moment, to identify the obvious source of the problem: the person who does not know how the system works.

But perhaps we should be careful not to mistake the person upon whom a system’s strain becomes visible for the person who caused it.

Self-represented litigants are not the problem either.

Our courts are open to everyone. Our rules apply to everyone. Our forms are available to everyone.

But much of the machinery of litigation operates on a quieter assumption: that the person using it will have professional help.

Lawyers know that a conference brief is not simply a form with empty boxes. We understand what belongs in an affidavit and what does not. We know that evidence, submissions and pleadings perform different functions. We know why service matters, why timelines matter, and why a judge may agree that something is important and nevertheless be unable to deal with it that day.

None of this knowledge is innate.

We were trained.

Then we practised.

And even after years of doing both, lawyers still disagree about the rules.

Yet when someone without that training enters the system, we can become remarkably impatient that they do not immediately understand its architecture.

We call the resulting difficulty a self-represented litigant problem.

What if some of it is a design problem?

There is, implicitly, an ideal self-represented litigant.

They read the rules.

They identify the issues.

They complete the correct forms, serve them correctly and on time, distinguish evidence from argument, organize disclosure, understand relevance, speak concisely, comply with endorsements and know which requests can properly be made at which procedural event.

They are sufficiently knowledgeable to move efficiently through a system designed for lawyers, but sufficiently unknowledgeable to need no lawyer.

In other words, the easiest self-represented litigant for the justice system is one who can perform many of the functions of counsel without actually having counsel.

That is an extraordinary expectation.

And family law may be one of the hardest places to impose it.

The person learning the Family Law Rules may simultaneously be losing a home, negotiating time with a child, responding to allegations of family violence, trying to understand support, facing child protection proceedings or watching savings disappear.

The legal problem may be one of the most consequential events of that person’s life.

For the system, it is Tuesday.

There is another assumption worth examining: that the absence of counsel somehow corresponds with the simplicity of the case.

Often, it does not.

A person may be unrepresented because the litigation has already consumed the resources that might once have paid for representation. They may fall above the threshold for publicly funded assistance while remaining unable to finance private litigation. They may have had counsel earlier. They may retain counsel for one stage and appear alone for another.

The case does not become simpler when the lawyer leaves.

The evidentiary record does not shrink. Family violence does not become easier to assess. A child’s needs do not become less important. Property does not become easier to trace. Credibility does not become less consequential.

What disappears is the professional intermediary who ordinarily translates the person’s lived problem into the language and procedure the court can process.

Representation does not eliminate complexity. It processes it.

That work is easy to overlook precisely because, when it is done well, much of it disappears before anyone enters the courtroom.

In the last Friendly Bar piece, I wrote about what I called “compressed justice”: what happens when increasingly complex human problems must be adjudicated within increasingly constrained institutional time.

Self-representation makes that tension particularly visible.

A represented matter may arrive before the judge already processed. The issues have been identified. Evidence has been organized. Irrelevant history has, ideally, been removed. The relief requested can be located in the materials. Counsel can answer procedural questions quickly.

Without that intermediary, some of that work reaches the courtroom unfinished.

The judge may have to determine not only the answer but the question. Opposing counsel may have to respond to arguments that shift as the hearing develops. Court staff may spend additional time explaining process. A represented party may understandably wonder why their own legal bill is increasing because the person opposite them has no lawyer.

Those burdens are real.

But the work did not disappear because the lawyer did.

It moved.

Someone still has to identify the issues.

Someone still has to separate evidence from allegation, determine relevance, organize documents, understand the available relief, navigate procedure and present the dispute in a form capable of adjudication.

With counsel, much of that work occurs before the courtroom sees the case.

Without counsel, it is redistributed.

Some falls to the litigant, who attempts it without training.

Some reaches court staff, whose ability to assist is necessarily limited.

Some reaches opposing counsel, who must respond while remaining loyal to their own client.

And some inevitably reaches the judge, who must preserve fairness and neutrality while extracting an adjudicable dispute from what has arrived.

That is not the disappearance of legal work.

It is the transfer of legal work from the place where the system was designed to have it performed to places never designed to absorb all of it.

And then we point to the resulting inefficiency and call it a self-rep problem.

None of this means that self-representation excuses misconduct.

A person without counsel remains bound by court orders. Procedural fairness does not require a judge to become that person’s lawyer. Nor should opposing counsel surrender their client’s interests to compensate for the absence of counsel on the other side.

There are also litigants — represented and unrepresented — who misuse process.

Abusive litigation is a problem.

Vexatious conduct is a problem.

Repeated non-compliance can be a problem.

Self-representation, by itself, is not.

That distinction matters.

If we treat self-representation itself as the problem, we stop examining what its prevalence may be telling us.

We see the missed deadline rather than the architecture.

We see the disorganized affidavit rather than the translation work that ordinarily precedes it.

We see the additional court time without asking where that work would have occurred had counsel been present.

And we locate the failure in the person standing before us.

Lawyers do more than stand beside litigants in court.

We translate. We organize. We narrow. We test. We discard. We turn lived experience into evidence and legal problems into adjudicable questions.

When representation disappears, those functions do not.

Someone still has to perform them.

So, perhaps the next time a self-represented litigant appears to be consuming too much of the system, the better question is not simply:

Why is this person taking so much time?

It is:

Where did we expect the work to go?

This is part 18 of a series. For links to previous parts, click here.

Concillia Muonde, B.Sc. (Econ), BSW (Hons), MSW, JD, is the founder and principal of Concillia Muonde Law Office, a family law practice based in Ottawa. Drawing on a multidisciplinary background in law, social work and economics, she brings a trauma-informed, client-directed approach to resolving family law matters. Her practice is focused on supporting survivors of family violence, LGBTQ+ clients and others navigating complex parenting and relationship breakdowns.

The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the author’s firm, its clients, Law360 Canada, LexisNexis Canada or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.

Interested in writing for us? To learn more about how you can add your voice to Law360 Canada, contact Analysis Editor Yvette Trancoso at Yvette.Trancoso-barrett@lexisnexis.ca or call 905-415-5811.