124,816 Individuals Opened Court E-Filing Accounts Last Year. Only 1,378 Law Firms Did.

Key Data

CTS user accounts grew by 128,930 in 2024/25 to reach 206,990 (SOJAR FY 2024/25, Figure 2.3.1, Ch.2 p.47-48). Of the new accounts, 124,816 were individuals, 1,378 were law firms, 2,715 were organisations and 21 were state entities (s.2.3.1, p.47). E-filing user satisfaction was 61% in 2025, down from 68% in April 2023 (Figure 2.3.2, p.48). Reading note: the account figures and satisfaction rate are reported directly in the SOJAR; the inference that this signals more self-representation, and the actions below, are CounselConnect's interpretation, not legal or financial advice.

What Is Happening

One number in the digitisation chapter deserves a second look. In a single year, individuals opened roughly ninety times as many new court e-filing accounts as law firms did. The system added 124,816 individual users against 1,378 firm accounts.

Read with care. An account is not a litigant, and some individuals opening accounts are represented clients or staff. But the ratio is wide enough to point one way: more people are touching the court's filing system directly, without a firm between them and the registry. The satisfaction reading dipped at the same time, from 68% to 61%, as the national rollout strained infrastructure (s.2.3.1).

Why It Is Happening

Behavioural and institutional (inferred): e-filing went nationwide in March 2024, and a system designed for direct access invites direct use. Lower the cost of filing without a lawyer and more people file without one. The CounselConnect read is that the account split is an early, imperfect proxy for a rising self-represented population, not proof of it.

Practice Impact and Revenue

If you litigate, you will meet more unrepresented opponents, and a self-represented party changes how a matter runs: looser pleadings, missed steps, and a bench that often extends latitude to the litigant in person. That is both a frustration and an opening. The opening is the underserved market itself. A large population now engaging the courts directly is a population that would pay for unbundled, fixed-fee help with discrete steps rather than full representation it cannot afford.

Revenue Impact

Unbundled legal services — drafting a single pleading, reviewing a filing, coaching a litigant for a hearing — are a fixed-fee product aimed squarely at the individuals filling the CTS account rolls. The market is signalling its size: over 124,000 new individual users in one year. Price discrete tasks at a fixed fee under the Advocates Remuneration Order and you reach clients who will never retain you for a full matter but will pay for the step they cannot do alone.

Strategic Insight — What Most Advocates Will Miss

Most advocates will read the digitisation chapter for the technology and skip the account breakdown. The miss is that the breakdown is a market map. A ninety-to-one ratio of new individual to firm accounts says the people entering the court system are mostly doing it without you, and the firms treating full representation as the only product are leaving the larger, faster-growing segment unserved. This is CounselConnect's reading, offered as opinion and not as legal or financial advice.