Research / Preprint
Litigation Literacy in the Lawyerless Court
Evidence from a Community-Based Eviction Defense Curriculum
Submitted for peer review. The manuscript has been submitted to the International Journal of Public Legal Education. This preprint has not been peer reviewed. It reports earlier Just Us Bridge work produced outside the Society by Professional Litigant, Inc.; the Society did not operate the course.
What is litigation literacy?
The paper examines what people need to know and do when facing a court case: recognize a legal problem, understand deadlines, respond to formal process, and make informed decisions about getting help.
It introduces the Winner Litigation Literacy Framework, which asks whether a person can turn knowledge into the next valid action in a case. A community-based eviction-defense curriculum in Chicago provides the case study. The paper treats education as a complement to legal representation and simpler court procedures, not a replacement for either.
What the evaluation found
Among 36 participants with both intake and exam records, average scores rose from 66% to 83%, a reported gain of 16.9 percentage points. These are immediate knowledge scores for that paired group.
Separate platform records indicate that approximately 47% of signups watched at least one instructional video. That measures the wider use of individual lessons, not full-course completion or improvement in court outcomes.
Jim Winner founded the program and authored the paper. Nisha Sutaria of Spek Strategies LLC prepared the independent evaluations commissioned by the program. The full methods and references are included in the preprint.
Cite the preprint
Winner, J. (2026). Litigation Literacy in the Lawyerless Court: Evidence from a Community-Based Eviction Defense Curriculum. Version 1.0. Preprint. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22894515
The PDF is shared unchanged from the published Zenodo version under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.