Blogathon 18/13 Status update

This morning my Decree Absolute landed on the doormat.

That, as such, isn’t the subject of this post.

The British legal system is.

I would like to say that from the initial contact with Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service (as it is now known), right through to the very final step in the process, that dealing with the Courts has been simple and hassle-free.

I would like to say that, but it would be a complete falsehood.

Dealing with Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service has not been easy. Using the court service has been hardship after hardship, compounded with difficulty after difficulty.

If ever a business – a public-facing service-provider – is bloated, over-done with idiotic staff and burdened with unnecessary red-tape, it is the British Courts.

We went through the divorce process without lawyers.

Don’t get me wrong, we didn’t need lawyers, the circumstances were stated and uncontested.

And the forms, that one needs to complete, are all online and downloadable.

But the forms have been written by legal administrators; they’re not in English – the forms are not in the every-day English that we use, they are not in the every-day English that all other forms are in.

Yes, I accept that they need to be ‘official’, but is that a good enough reason to make the forms incomprehensible?

Is that a good enough reason for publicly-accessible forms to be littered with words and phrases from two hundred years ago?

Instead of putting the compulsion on members of the public having to learn centuries-old terminology, the law (which, after all, exists to serve the public), should get a swift kick up the backside, and modernise itself.

The entire legal lexicon needs updating.

Every single legal document template needs modernising.

Because until these things have happened, the law (and the legal system) will remain out of reach of the public.

Until these modernisations have taken place, the law will be the exclusive preserve of the legal profession.

And that isn’t very public-facing.

That’s a cosy little club.

A cartel.

Of course, I don’t expect any rush from our political servants to update the legal system.

Not when one sees that 80% of the Front Benches are, erm, lawyers.