Middle District pro se portal up and running.

The best advice is to hire a lawyer. Or see if legal services can help with your dispute.

But if citizens are unwilling or unable to have legal representation, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida has created an online pro se portal to walk litigants through the process of creating a complaint and then filing it with the court.

"The complaint builder is brilliant," said Catherine Peek McEwen, a bankruptcy judge in the U.S. Middle District in Tampa. "It was designed to be dismissal-proof. It was built to withstand a 12(b) motion to dismiss. I can't brag enough about Judge Dalton and what he did."

That's Judge Roy "Skip" Dalton, on the bench in the Middle District in Orlando, who serves on the Information Technology Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States and shepherds the Middle District's ongoing pro se project.

A look around the country landed eyes on the U.S. Eastern District of Missouri, where an interactive complaint builder allows pro se litigants to craft a complaint, by answering questions, much like TurboTax.

"We stole their work with their permission," Judge Dalton said.

Two staff members of The Florida Bar Journal & News took the pro se portal for a test drive and found it to be easy to maneuver. "Jan, we will begin gathering the information for your complaint."

If I had said "child custody" was my issue, the complaint builder would have told me I was in the wrong court.

And if the pro se litigant can't swing the $400 filing fee, there were instructions for filing an affidavit disclosing income status, to proceed anyway as an indigent.

With one of every 11 civil non-prisoner cases in the Middle District filed by a pro se party, a woefully outdated website, and clerks and court personnel unable to give legal advice to frustrated pro se litigants, it was time to act, said Judge Dalton.

He served on the Bench Bar Committee, chaired by U.S. Middle District Judge Marcia Morales Howard in Jacksonville.

Two years ago, Dalton said, the committee took a look at its resources (fees generated from the pro hac vice fee applications, for example) and its outdated website.

The committee decided that spending the money on online upgrades was a "right fit into the framework of the Bench Bar Committee's purpose: to have a better liaison between pro se litigants and the court."

Within two years, the Middle District updated its website and created a pro se portal called "Proceeding Without a Lawyer"...