The biggest issue with pro se litigants is not their lack of understanding of the law. Honestly the law is not that hard. The law is usually very straightforwar

The biggest issue with pro se litigants is not their lack of understanding of the law. Honestly the law is not that hard. The law is usually very straightforward if you spend any time thinking about the particular domain in front of you. The issue with pro se litigants is that they haven't picked up "how" to think about their case. Court is, on the surface at least, a very sterile environment filled with people who deal with life altering situations every day and are mostly numb to any individual case. That isn't an indictment because for the most part people care a great deal about things, but probably not about what the layman cares about. Case in point is drunk driving. I've done it two or three times in my younger years. Growing up in a rural area I had my own ethics about it. I never did and would never have done it in a populated area, but I never saw the harm in making my way home on dirt roads surrounded by corn fields where there was no one else to hit. Again, i only did that a few times in my college years and was very against drunk driving. But this is the ethic that I had in mind as I showed up to my first "DUI Day" in county court as a student in practice prosecutor. The entire courtroom was filled, and more people overflowed outside - at least 200 people. And that was just the morning docket. In the afternoon it was a different 200 people. This happened every single week, 400 new people a week, without end. All thinking to some degree, just like me, that they were special in some way or what they did wasn't that bad. I learned quickly just much of a problem drunk driving is and how naive most of these pro se litigants were in thinking about their own cases. They would raise some minor complaint about the officer or some stupid thing expecting the court to side with them and throw the case out. But we see a thousand complaints and stupid things a day and almost never does it materially impact the evidence against the person. But the mindset of the pro se litigants is that they are special. The only litigants that were ever special were the ones who either a) detached from their case in a way that let them actually objectively decide if they had a good case or not; or b) had enough sense to know they were guilty and present to us good reasons why this episode would never happen again. I dropped the hammer on so many people who weren't ready to accept they were going to ve convicted. But I let people off incredibly lightly who demonstrated that they were accountable despite making a mistake that I myself made a few times.