Litigant Portal
Public-interest legal infrastructure for self-represented litigants.
The Litigant Portal is a court-deployed legal navigation platform for self-represented litigants in civil matters. It provides jurisdiction-specific legal information, guided workflows, and document preparation tools, deployed in partnership with courts and legal aid organizations.
The majority of civil court appearances in the United States involve at least one party without a lawyer. These litigants face eviction, wage garnishment, custody disputes, and debt collection, often without understanding the rules, deadlines, or consequences that govern their cases. A missed deadline can mean a default judgment. The wrong form can get a case dismissed. The system was not designed for them.
The Litigant Portal is built for anyone navigating the legal system without a lawyer, whether they are responding to a summons or initiating a claim, facing an urgent deadline, or planning a next step. Many access the internet exclusively through a smartphone. Many are managing work, childcare, financial instability, or housing precarity at the same time that they are trying to understand what a court process requires of them.
The Litigant Portal is built and maintained by Free Law Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and licensed under AGPL-3.0. It does not replace courts, legal aid organizations, or attorneys. It extends their reach, serving more people, more consistently, at scale. A founding cohort of court partners is currently being onboarded for a pilot launch targeted for September 2026. The platform is open source and available on Github.
Mission and Guiding Principles
The principles that govern what the team behind the Litigant Portal builds, how they build it, and why. Covers the Litigant Portal's commitment to trust, harm reduction, plain language, and the distinction between legal information and legal advice.
Read more about the core principles governing what we build and how.
How It Works
A walkthrough fo the three phases of the Litigant Portal experience: Assess, Prepare, and Act. Covers both the self-select and AI-assisted paths, and how court-configured content powers both.