{"id":2268,"date":"2009-04-10T18:45:57","date_gmt":"2009-04-10T18:45:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2268"},"modified":"2009-04-10T18:45:57","modified_gmt":"2009-04-10T18:45:57","slug":"going_it_alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2268","title":{"rendered":"Going It Alone"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Do you think I need a lawyer?”<\/p>\n

People ask me that question regularly and I usually give the standard answer they teach us in law school: “It depends.” Not every legal issue requires an attorney’s advice. When I clerked for a judge in Hennepin County, I saw plenty of people appear before the court pro se. Sometimes, people can represent themselves just fine. But in many cases, people would have been better served by having a lawyer at their side. But lawyers can be expensive and, as the Times<\/i> points out, the recession is forcing more people to represent themselves<\/a> whether they want to or not. <\/p>\n

The judge for whom I clerked did his best to guide pro se parties through the hearing process and to ensure that they don’t get ambushed by opposing counsel. But judges aren’t advocates; I can remember the pained expression on my judges’s face as we watched a confused and sometimes terrified pro se individual struggle to present his or her side of the case. My own rule of thumb: if the other side is represented by counsel, do whatever you can to obtain representation. <\/p>\n

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“Do you think I need a lawyer?” People ask me that question regularly and I usually give the standard answer they teach us in law school: “It depends.” Not every legal issue requires an attorney’s advice. When I clerked for a judge in Hennepin County, I saw plenty of people appear before the court pro […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-AA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}