Language of DIY Justice: Communication practices & processes

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The project explores the language of DIY Justice by focusing on communication as an inherent part of court hearings as well as court processes and procedures. Since cuts to legal aid in 2013, an increasingly high number of litigants in person (LIPs, people who represent themselves in legal proceedings without a lawyer) have been left without affordable options for legal advice. Yet many procedural, administrative and communicative questions about DIY Justice remain unresolved. By focusing on language and communication processes, this project will contribute to the understanding of perceptions and self-perceptions of LIPs and communication requirements imposed on them by the legal profession, courts and the legal system; this will lead to practical suggestions on improve communicative, procedural and administrative challenges currently faced by everybody involved in semi-represented or unrepresented cases. The project uses quantitative and qualitative mixed methods approach to investigate the following aspects: language used to construct perceptions around DIY Justice; legal-lay communication; and communication and elicitation processes embedded in court administration and procedures (e.g. how information and evidence is elicited through administrative steps and procedural rules). The project is divided into four work packages. The first one contrasts the language LIPs, judges and legal professionals use when discussing their perceptions towards DIY Justice and each other. This will lead to developing resources for supporting LIPs, initiatives on raising awareness of LIPs' ambiguous role in legal proceedings and suggestions for holistic support of those involved in DIY Justice. The second work package will investigate the differences between communication styles of LIPs and legal professionals and lead to initiatives for supporting communicative competence of LIPs and accommodating communication challenges during legal proceedings. The last two work packages investigate communication and elicitation processes embedded within court administration and civil procedure rules, thus contributing predominantly to legal questions. This will lead to specific recommendations for court administration and HMCTS (Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Services) on drafting court forms, guidance materials and court correspondence as well as suggestions to the Civil Procedure Rules Committee on updating Civil Procedure Rules. The data the project will collect range from a survey of LIPs, interviews with LIPS, judges and legal professionals to court observations and analysis of court bundles, HMCTS court forms and official guidance materials for court users. By incorporating corpus linguistic tools with quantitative and qualitative syntactic & lexical analysis and ethnography of communication analysis, the project presents an innovative approach to researching administrative law and procedural law. The methodological approach of the project will inspire further interdisciplinary research on the topic.Academic outcomes will include publications (monograph and articles in legal scholarly journals) as well as workshops for legal scholars and practitioners to present the research design and findings and inspire academics in other disciplines. Impact related outcomes will include a touring exhibition, executive summaries and reports for HMCTS and third sector organisations (e.g. JUSTICE, Public Law Project). The project takes a holistic approach to DIY Justice and will result in practical suggestions to address complex language and communication related challenges. By collecting data that HMCTS does not collect, interrelating results from different data sets and focusing on language needs of LIPs, the project will be in a strong position to make innovative and practical suggestions that will contribute to the HMCTS reform.