The Justice System Is Where the Electric Grid Was 70 Years Ago

Universal access didn’t just make those systems more fair. It made them better. The same is true of courts.

I am probably one of the few people working in the access-to-justice space without a law license. I have a PhD in electrical engineering. I studied the quality and reliability of the electric power grid — power plants, transformers, the lines that carry electricity into homes and businesses.

I am also a self-represented litigant. Not by choice. I found myself in civil court without a lawyer — which is where Courtroom5 was born, and which is why this newsletter exists.

That background is why I see the civil legal crisis differently than most people in the space.

This week I had fifteen minutes at LIT Con 2026 — the annual Legal Innovation and Technology Conference at Suffolk University Law School — to make a case to a room full of legal aid lawyers, court technologists, law professors, and access-to-justice leaders. These are not easy people to impress. Here’s what I said.

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Sonja Ebron presented at LIT Con 2026 at Suffolk University Law School on April 13, 2026, as part of the Access to Justice/Poverty Law Innovation Showcase, moderated by Bob Ambrogi.

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If you’d rather read than watch, here’s the longer version.

Before the Civil Rights Movement, the Power Lines Stopped at the Tracks

It may be hard to believe now, but before the Civil Rights Movement and the enforcement of universal service obligations, electric utilities would literally stop running power lines on the outskirts of poor and ethnic minority neighborhoods.

If you lived on the wrong side of those lines, you burned oil lamps for light. You burned kerosene for heat. You could look right across the street — right across the railroad tracks — and see electric lighting in the houses over there, fancy kitchen equipment, all of it. But you couldn’t get it. The utility companies didn’t extend service to your neighborhood. The economics didn’t work for them, so they didn’t bother.

And here’s what the system looked like as a result: lights flickered constantly. Toaster ovens blew up randomly. Power lines dropped in the street. You look at photographs from that era and the infrastructure is just visibly degraded — because when you design a system around the easiest and most profitable customers, you get a fragmented system. You get deserts of no electricity surrounded by islands of unreliable electricity, and the grid as a whole suffers.

The scale of the exclusion was staggering. In the early 1930s, about 90% of urban America had electric power while only about 10% of rural America did. For rural communities written off by private capital, it took an act of Congress — the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, public financing, rural cooperatives — to begin closing that gap. For Black and minority urban neighborhoods, it took the Civil Rights Movement. For Native communities on reservations, the wait was longer still — federal electrification programs didn't reach many tribal lands until the 1970s, and some remain underserved today.

After litigation, after public utility commissions forced utilities to serve everyone, something changed. Not just who had access. The system itself changed. Over the next decades, the quality and reliability of American electricity improved dramatically. Outages became rare. The power coming into homes became stable. Universal access and system quality turned out to be connected.

My Co-Founder Tells a Similar Story About Libraries

Debra Slone, my co-founder and the other half of Courtroom5, spent twenty years as a public librarian and library school professor. She’ll tell you the same story in a different vocabulary.

Before the Civil Rights Movement, most Black communities were excluded from public libraries entirely — or given separate, underfunded branches with smaller collections, fewer hours, and less staff. Rural communities and poor communities faced their own version: libraries that were far away, thinly resourced, or practically inaccessible. What existed wasn’t built for them.

After desegregation mandates and expanded public investment, libraries opened. Collections deepened. Services standardized. And again — not just fairness improved. The quality of what public libraries offered, for everyone, got better.

There’s a pattern here that we don’t name often enough: when we stopped rationing a socially essential service to the easiest customers and started treating it as infrastructure, the infrastructure itself became more reliable, more useful, and more trusted. The exclusion hadn’t just been unfair to the people left out. It had been making the systems worse for everyone inside them.

The Justice System Is Repeating This Pattern

Now look at the courts.

In many civil courts, the majority of cases involve at least one person without a lawyer. The National Center for State Courts has been documenting this for years. The Legal Services Corporation reports that low-income Americans received no or inadequate legal help for 92% of their serious civil legal problems.

That’s not a gap. That’s the operating condition of the system.

And who is most exposed to it? Disproportionately, the same communities that went without electricity and without equal library access: ethnic minorities, people in rural areas, people in poverty. The “neutral” design of the system — complex procedure, professional language, no guidance for the unrepresented — produces unequal outcomes without requiring anyone to discriminate explicitly. It’s the same pattern. Different century. Different institution.

Here’s what it looks like from the bench: people who don’t know the rules. Deadlines missed. Filings incomplete or defective. Arguments that don’t connect to what the court actually needs to decide.

Judges aren’t just deciding cases. They’re trying to interpret noise.

This Is a System Performance Problem, Not Just a Fairness Problem

Here’s the argument I made at LIT Con that I think is the most important and least-discussed:

Think about what it means that most civil cases don’t go to trial.

Trial is the best outcome in the justice system, because you get a decision on the merits — a judge or jury actually evaluating the facts and the law. What we typically get instead is settlement for a variety of reasons, or cases lost on procedural technicalities, or defendants who never respond because they didn’t know they could.

That means the legal system is operating with massive missing data. Fact patterns that might establish important precedents never reach juries. Claims that might be meritorious — or not — never get evaluated. We have a system that is supposed to set the rules of civil society through the accumulation of decided cases, and most of the cases aren’t being decided.

Experienced litigators routinely steer clients away from trial precisely because outcomes are so unpredictable. This isn't just my observation. Legal scholar Marc Galanter documented it in his landmark 2004 study “The Vanishing Trial”: the share of federal civil cases resolved by trial collapsed from 11.5% in 1962 to under 2% in 2002 — even as case filings quintupled. The legal system is processing more disputes than ever while deciding fewer of them on the merits. As Galanter put it, a central feature of the common law process is shrinking while the legal system expands along every other dimension.

We are generating less actual law from actual cases, which makes the common law itself thinner and outcomes harder to predict. I think part of that unpredictability comes from the missing data — from the millions of cases that never produced a real decision.

Courts and legal scholars have noticed. In a Dædalus issue on access to justice, former judge Fern A. Fisher wrote that judges support legal aid “because it assists in the efficient and effective administration of the courts they run.” The Conference of Chief Justices — the body of chief justices of every state court in America — has explicitly endorsed not lawyers alone but “a continuum of meaningful and appropriate services” that includes self-help tools, technology, and process redesign. They know the system isn’t working. They’re asking for something different.

The Pew Charitable Trusts, in a framework for court modernization, found that traditional court performance metrics — caseload administration, clearance rates — have actually hindered reform by measuring the wrong things. Courts have been optimizing for throughput when they should be optimizing for outcomes.

The Wrong Fix

The instinctive response is: just give everyone a lawyer.

Lawyers matter enormously. That’s not the argument against them. The argument is that a lawyer-for-everyone model isn’t how you solve an infrastructure problem. The country didn’t electrify rural America by assigning an engineer to every farmhouse. It built cooperative structures that delivered reliable electricity at scale. Public libraries didn’t achieve universal reading access by assigning a librarian to every reader. They built systems.

Even with AI improving legal efficiency, the numbers don’t work for universal representation. Cost, geography, and the structure of the legal market will leave most self-represented litigants exactly where they are. The system has to be designed around that reality.

What Universal Litigation Competence Looks Like

This doesn’t mean turning everyone into a lawyer. It means giving every person who walks into a civil courtroom a baseline ability to function in the process.

The IAALS “Cases Without Counsel” study, one of the most rigorous qualitative examinations of self-represented litigants’ experience, documented exactly this: people don’t lack facts or motivation. They lack staged, usable guidance tied to the procedural moment they’re in.

At minimum: understanding where you are procedurally, identifying what the court actually needs to decide, connecting your facts to the legal claims or defenses that matter, assembling documents that courts can use, and knowing what to do next.

Make every case legible to the court.

What I’ve learned building Courtroom5 is that this is a design problem, and it’s solvable. Most self-represented litigants know what happened to them. Sometimes they have evidence. Occasionally they know the name of the claim. Very rarely do they understand that the law defines specific elements that must be proven — that you can’t just tell your story and hope the judge sorts it out like Judge Judy.

They need sequenced guidance, not just information. They need doctrine translated into tasks. They need documents generated from their actual fact pattern and the rules of their specific court. And they need community — because this work is psychologically brutal, especially when you’re facing a trained attorney on the other side.

That’s what we built with the LAW Accelerator at Courtroom5. LAW is an acronym: Learn how courts really work. Act with safe AI legal tools. Walk in community with others on the same fight for justice. It’s a structured program with four components — proof, strategy, documents, and a learning community — designed to compress the time to litigation competence for people who are determined to do the work themselves.

We don’t take everyone. That’s a deliberate choice for now. People who want a form to download and a button to push aren’t ready for real litigation, and putting them into a process that requires genuine engagement would harm them. The people we admit have watched a webinar, read a white paper, or gotten an email series that explains what litigation actually demands — and passed a quiz showing they understood it. If they’re willing to do that, they’re willing to do the harder work of fighting their case.

That’s not universal access. Not yet. But it’s the direction.

The System We Could Have

The NCSC’s recent work on civil court trends explicitly describes self-represented litigants not as anomalous users of the system but as its primary users — especially in housing, family, and consumer debt cases. If courts were businesses, self-represented litigants would be their main customer.

You don’t build a business by designing for a different customer than the one who actually shows up.

When we built the electric grid for everyone, we lit up the country — and the grid became more reliable for everyone inside it. When we built public libraries for everyone, we built an informed citizenry — and the breadth and quality of library services improved for all users.

The civil justice system is next. The question is whether we treat universal litigation competence as infrastructure — something the system invests in because it makes the system work better — or whether we keep treating it as a charity problem, patched at the margins, funded inconsistently, and never quite reaching the people who need it most.

I think the same communities that waited longest for electricity and for equal library access are still waiting. And I think the system is worse for their absence.

That’s what Without Counsel is about. Every two weeks I’ll be exploring what we’re losing when millions of Americans face court alone — and what justice could look like if everyone could actually participate. Subscribe below if that’s the conversation you want to be part of.

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