The Court Will See You Now. Just Not Really.

What access to justice actually looks like when you are the one who needs it.

I Know What the Gap Looks Like. I Live In It.

I want to be precise about something before I start citing statistics. I am not writing this piece as an observer. I am not writing it as a researcher who has reviewed court data and drawn conclusions from a safe distance. I am writing it as a defendant in an active civil case in Saginaw County Circuit Court, pro se, facing a licensed attorney who has spent the better part of six months using procedural mechanisms to impose maximum financial and psychological burden on me while a circuit court judge finds technically correct reasons to avoid engaging with what is actually happening.

I had heard, before any of this began, that Saginaw County was crooked. People said it the way people say things about courts they have learned not to trust: matter-of-factly, without elaboration, as though it were simply known. I walked in anyway with an open mind. I am a person who covers courts for a living. I believe in documented records over reputations. I wanted to see for myself. I have now seen for myself.

I have filed supplements. I have filed an emergency motion. I have filed a noticed motion. I have documented perjured statements from the plaintiff’s clients, a coordinated pressure campaign across multiple counties, and a consent judgment I signed after a judge pressured me into it during a hearing. The court’s response, most recently on May 5, 2026, was to deny my emergency motion on procedural grounds and tell me to file a noticed motion instead. Which I did. On the same day. I am still waiting for the judge to acknowledge the harm being caused.

The last time I filed a noticed motion? The judge cancelled my hearing and decided on paper. Figure that one out.

I say this not to litigate my case in this space, but because the data I am about to cite is easy to abstract. Numbers are clean. My experience is not. And if this piece is going to be honest, it has to hold both.

The Numbers Michigan Does Not Want to Lead With

These are the Michigan Access to Justice Campaign’s own figures. Approximately 1.7 million Michigan residents qualified for free civil legal aid in 2024 because their income fell below 125% of the federal poverty level. There was one legal aid attorney for every 4,350 of them. Seventy-four percent went without any representation.

The Legal Services Corporation’s 2022 Justice Gap study, drawn from a nationally representative survey of approximately 5,000 adults, found that 74% of low-income households faced at least one civil legal problem. Of those, they received no or insufficient help for 92% of the substantial civil legal problems they encountered. The Michigan Supreme Court’s Justice for All Commission, established by Administrative Order 2021-1, has set a goal of 100 percent access to the civil justice system. The gap between that aspiration and these numbers is not a rounding error. It is a policy failure.

The Michigan Bar Journal put it plainly in a piece co-authored by Justice Brian K. Zahra, who chairs the JFAC: more than 30 million Americans encounter a civil legal problem without the help of a lawyer every year. Justice Zahra framed this as the reason the commission exists. What he did not say, and what no commission report will say, is what happens when those 30 million people show up in court against someone who does have a lawyer, and the lawyer knows every procedural lever available, and the judge treats the imbalance as a neutral fact rather than a structural injustice requiring active correction.

What the Rules Say and What Actually Happens

Michigan’s own judicial conduct standards require something specific of judges who encounter self-represented litigants. The Michigan Code of Judicial Conduct, Canon 3(A)(4), states that a judge may make reasonable efforts to facilitate the ability of all litigants, including self-represented litigants, to be fairly heard. A companion provision states that in the interest of ensuring fairness and access to justice, judges may make reasonable efforts to help self-represented litigants understand the proceedings and applicable procedural requirements.

The word “may” is doing a lot of work in those sentences. It is discretionary. It is not a mandate. And in practice, that discretion tends to collapse into a version of false neutrality in which applying the same procedural standards to a licensed attorney and a pro se defendant is treated as fairness, when it is structurally anything but.

I know what it looks like when that tension resolves against you. It looks like a judge denying your emergency motion because the conduct requiring immediate relief technically occurred months ago, even though you have documented that the same conduct continued through that morning. It looks like being told you can file a noticed motion, as though that is relief, when you know the noticed motion will require you to appear, prepare, and argue, without counsel, against someone who has done this hundreds of times. It looks like a process server at your door at 6:23 in the evening and then a social media post about the attempt afterward, both of which the court characterizes as not quite enough for emergency status.

The Anatomy of Institutional Abandonment

There is a phrase that recurs in access to justice literature: the justice gap. It is useful shorthand. It is also, in my experience, a euphemism. A gap implies distance between two points that are at least oriented toward each other. What I have experienced in Saginaw County Circuit Court is not a gap. It is a design feature.

The civil courts were built by lawyers, for lawyers. The Legal Services Corporation’s own anniversary materials acknowledge this plainly. The rules of procedure, the motion practice, the standards of evidence, the timing requirements, the formatting conventions, the norms of oral argument: all of it assumes a level of legal literacy that takes years of professional training to acquire. When a pro se litigant enters that system, they are not navigating a gap. They are navigating a system that was not built for them, against someone for whom it was.

What I Told the Court and What the Court Did With It

I want to walk through what I have put in front of Saginaw County Circuit Court, because the access to justice conversation tends to be abstract and I want to be specific about what “the system not working” actually looks like in a real case.

I have filed, with this court, documented evidence that plaintiff’s clients submitted materially false statements in these proceedings. I have filed evidence that opposing counsel contacted me directly after I directed him to my retained attorney, citing a procedural technicality (no formal appearance yet filed) to justify that contact, on the same morning he filed a sanctions motion against me. I have filed evidence of a process server appearing at my home at 6:23 p.m. and a social media post about that attempt. I have filed evidence of a communication sent to the judge’s clerk, with me copied, that served no litigation purpose directed at me except to ensure I received a real-time signal that opposing counsel viewed the denial of my motion as a win worth noting to court staff.

The court has reviewed these materials. The court’s May 5, 2026 order acknowledged the April 29 contact from opposing counsel. It noted that as a pro se litigant, all litigation communications must come directly to me, which is correct. It then denied my emergency motion because I had not presented evidence of recent conduct that would justify an emergency motion, which is wrong, and directed me to file a noticed motion, which I did.

The Consent Judgment That Should Never Have Existed

At the first show cause hearing in this matter, I signed a consent judgment. I want to be precise about what that means: I signed it because Judge Borrello pressured me into signing it during a proceeding he was presiding over, a hearing the court refused to allow me to attend via Zoom, requiring me to drive two and a half hours each way to appear in person. I was pro se. I was facing a licensed attorney. I was under active threat of adverse legal consequences if I did not sign. The pressure was not subtle and it was not implicit. It was the judge, in the room I had driven five hours round trip to reach, making clear what would happen if I did not agree.

Everything that has happened since, including the show cause proceedings that followed, is built on that document. And a judge cannot fairly preside over contempt of an order he pressured a pro se litigant into signing. That is not a procedural technicality. That is a due process violation. It is also, if the transcript of that hearing reflects what I experienced, a Judicial Tenure Commission matter.

What the System Offers and What It Actually Provides

Michigan Legal Help exists. Self Help Centers are staffed with legal navigators. The Justice for All Commission is working on plain language forms. Lakeshore Legal Aid exists. These are real resources. They are also not counsel. And the civil justice gap is not, at its core, a navigation problem. It is a representation problem.

When you are pro se against a licensed attorney in a civil matter, you are not disadvantaged because you cannot find the right form. You are disadvantaged because the attorney on the other side knows that every procedural motion they file requires you to respond, that every hearing costs you time and money you may not have, that every delay is a drain on a finite resource, and that the system will not stop them from using all of that strategically. The forms being in plain language does not change any of that.

Why I’m Writing This Now — Updated May 6, 2026

This article was published on May 5, 2026. Since then the record has grown. What follows is a precise accounting of what was filed that day and what is pending.

On May 5, 2026, in Case No. 25-2441-CZ, I filed the following: a Noticed Motion to Quash the Order to Show Cause and for Injunctive Relief; a Motion for Disqualification of Judge André R. Borrello pursuant to MCR 2.003 on three independent grounds including personal knowledge of disputed facts, irreconcilable conflict of interest, and failure to maintain the appearance of impartiality; a Motion to Dismiss with Prejudice on grounds of void filing, fraud on the court through misrepresentation of the AGC complaint status, presentation of a fabricated witness, and documented bad faith prosecution; a Motion to Compel production of Plaintiff’s GoDaddy domain management panel with a request for adverse inference instruction if production is refused; a First Request for Production of Documents covering 23 categories of evidence including the ghost witness, Facebook coordination, the AGC complaint misrepresentation, and perjured statements across related proceedings; a Written Response to the Order to Show Cause; and a Consolidated Supplement to Record placing the full documented pattern before the court in a single filing.

I also filed, on the same day, an Emergency Application for Leave to Appeal with the Michigan Court of Appeals, together with a Motion for Immediate Consideration and a Motion for Stay of Proceedings. That application asks the Court of Appeals to stay the show cause hearing currently scheduled pending appellate review of four independently meritorious grounds for relief.

I filed a complaint with the Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission. I wrote to the Michigan Justice for All Commission.

I am telling you all of this not because I want credit for a mountain of paperwork. I am telling you because this is what it costs to fight a malicious lawsuit brought by a licensed attorney against a pro se defendant in a county courthouse where the judge has decided, repeatedly and in writing, to find the narrowest procedural ground available rather than read the record in front of him. This is what access to justice looks like when you refuse to stop asking for it.

I do not know what the Court of Appeals will do. I know what this court has done with everything I have filed so far, which is essentially ignore it. I am still waiting for that to change.