Court Forms as Part of Online Courts: Elicitation and Communication in the Early Stages of Legal Proceedings

Abstract

The article explores court forms as an interactive genre essential for legal-lay communication in civil and family proceedings: court forms elicit key information from predominantly lay users for the purposes of court administration and the judiciary. The information presented in court forms defines the agenda and communicative focus of the subsequent hearings and settlement negotiations, and in some instances even the path the proceedings would take. It is thus important to consider court forms in terms of their comprehensibility as well as functionality for eliciting legally coherent narratives and facilitating efficient engagement of lay participants with the proceedings. The case study presented in the article draws on the combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to explore two versions of the court form most frequently used by self-represented parties in England and Wales, ‘Form C100: Apply for a court order to make arrangements for a child or resolve a dispute about their upbringing’. The comparison of the paper form and its redesigned online version identifies the improvements made as part of the digitisation process but also indicates communicative challenges which can prevent the lay person from presenting the relevant information. The discussion provides an opportunity to reflect on the role of language in online courts.

Legal-Lay Discourse and Procedural Justice in Family and County Courts

“…Even just the first step of identifying a problem as a legal issue has been shown as a challenge for the layperson: circumstances which can be resolved by taking legal action often go unnoticed if legal advice is not available (Genn 1999). Similarly, once the court user is ready to take legal action, the first step of starting the proceedings involves completing court forms which are linguistically complex and, as a genre for evidence elicitation, often present one of the first discursive challenges for court users' narrativisation (Grieshofer 2023a;Grieshofer et al 2021).…”

“…This complicates elicitation and narrativisation strategies during pre-court stages if court users cannot understand what is required, and during court hearings if court users fail to complete the pre-court stages (cf. Grieshofer et al 2021;Grieshofer 2023a).…”

“…There are different types of information court users need to access: legal, procedural, administrative. Unfortunately, court users find it difficult to find the relevant information online or in court guidance documents due to multiple limitations: generic nature of the information, lack of clear cross-referencing to relevant legislation, complex language, exclusion of explanations relevant for SRLs, biased or misleading content (Grieshofer et al 2021;Grieshofer 2023aGrieshofer & 2022c. The HM Courts and Tribunals Service's (HMCTS) slow pace with addressing the issues pertinent to informational justice complicates court users' access to procedural justice (Grieshofer et al 2021).…”

“…By comparison, the first pre-court stage in child arrangements proceedings requires court users to summarise their cases in response to questions in court forms and questions asked by a Cafcass officer over the phone. Neither of the two provides an opportunity to explore the issues in detail and each restricts the responses through closed questions or limited interactional space (Grieshofer 2023a(Grieshofer , 2023b.…”

Development dilemma and solutions to online civil litigation in China: Kyrgyzstan experience

“…According to T. Grieshofer (2023), current improvements in the digitalisation of court proceedings are still limited in certain aspects. The main barrier for court users in the early stages of proceedings remains communication problems, including translation of passages with grammatical and lexical difficulties, persistent difficulties with definitions and insufficient support for court users in creating their documents.…”