Chief justices of various supreme courts, with support from private foundations, have established task forces to probe the issue further. In 2016, a committee of the Conference of Chief Justices, a national organization of state supreme court heads, issued a report recommending that courts enact rules to provide a more fair and just civil legal system, especially with respect to debt collection cases. The amount of these claims is almost always less than $10,000 and frequently under $5,000, and typically involves unpaid medical bills, credit card balances, auto loans, student debt, and other types of consumer credit, excluding housing (mortgage or rent).įor more than a decade, the American Bar Association and legal advocacy organizations such as the Legal Services Corporation and the National Legal Aid and Defenders Association have sounded alarms about worrisome trends underway in the civil legal system. In the typical debt claim case, a business-often a company that buys delinquent debt from the original creditor-sues an individual to collect on a debt. The most common type of such business-to-consumer lawsuits is debt claims, also called consumer debt and debt collection lawsuits. Thirty years later, that docket is dominated not by cases involving adversaries seeking redress for an injury or business dispute, but rather by cases in which a company represented by an attorney sues an individual, usually without the benefit of legal counsel, for money owed. The lawyers presented their cases, and the judge, acting as the neutral arbiter, rendered a decision based on those legal and factual arguments. In 1990, a typical civil court docket featured cases with two opposing sides, each with an attorney, most frequently regarding commercial matters and disputes over contracts, injuries, and other harms. The business of state civil courts has changed over the past three decades.
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