According to my quick research it costs some $500 to file a lawsuit in federal court. Is that all?
Or can such lawsuit become a huge financial and time drain? I would like to hear from people who have done it. From ordinary people with limited financial and time resources. People who must work every day.
Assume the case is a pro se challenge to the constitutionality of a local ordinance.
a pro se challenge to the constitutionality of a local ordinance
Don't even consider making a pro se challenge to the constitutionality of a local ordinance.
Your odds of winning are tiny (less than 5%) and your odds of losing, having the ordinance declared constitutional when it shouldn't be, are high (more than 95%). Your odds having to pay thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars as sanctions and costs to the local government are very substantial (probably at least 33%).
If you can't find a top notch lawyer to take on this case for you, don't do it.
My firm's biggest client at my first law firm job out of law school involved defending local governments against litigation like this and from allegations of governmental liability arising from misconduct.
Pro se parties lost 100% of the time over the several year that I worked there and I have never, ever, in 30 years of practicing law, seen a pro se party successfully have a law declared unconstitutional in a stand alone lawsuit in the jurisdiction (Colorado) where I practice most of the time. (In a criminal case, where this is raised as a defense, you have access to counsel, and very, very rarely a criminal defendant will win in these circumstances).
Even parties represented by lawyers who were anything less than top notch (including those we faced off against most of the time in rural Colorado where the average competence of civil rights lawyers was lower than in major cities), would lose at least two-thirds of the time in litigation to challenge the constitutionality of an ordinance, even in cases that seemed straightforward where privately as lawyers defending the local government, we knew that a top notch lawyer could have succeeded.
Later in my career, I was a law partner of the state legislator who chaired the committee that handled the litigation activity of the state legislature which was not infrequently made a party to lawsuits raising constitutional issues, and I provided private advice and counsel to my law partner on these matters. Again, pro se parties never won, and even parties represented by less than top notch lawyers lost a very large percentage of time (probably 75% or more, although I didn't have an exact tally). And, in those cases, pro se parties often ended up getting criminally prosecuted because they took actions that they believed were legal or constitutionally protected but they were mistaken. While these pro se parties may not have literally had a DMS-V psychiatric disorder, they came across to judges and lawyers in the legal system as "crazy".
Sanctions against plaintiffs related to the litigation were common for pro se parties and not unusual against parties represented by lawyers who were not top notch.
Undertaking to bring this kind of lawsuit is foolhardy beyond measure and very likely to backfire leaving you worse off than it you did nothing. In a best case scenario, 95% of the time, you will get a binding legal determination that the ordinance you are challenging is constitutional, even if a good lawyer could have secured the opposite result. No sane individual would do this if they realized what they were getting into by doing so and had a realistic understanding of their likelihood of success.
Any judge would likewise subconsciously presume, until clearly proven otherwise, that you are mentally ill (although a judge will almost never say so publicly), or have an extremely low IQ to the point where it is a developmental disability.
Your odds of success, knowing nothing about the merits and assuming that this would be a strong, winnable case, if you hired a lawyer, are probably on the order of 5% or less. Even then, this is basically only possible at all if you are lucky enough to get a judge has an ax to grind against the other party and is bending over backwards to rule in your favor. This is, for example, the basic judicial attitude that allowed the criminal defendant in Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963) to ultimately convince the U.S. Supreme Court to take up his case and appoint an attorney for him to litigate the final step of the merits argument for him in their court.
Most of the time, the court will never even get to the merits and you will be defeated due to some sort of pre-trial procedural default, or other technicality, like standing to sue.
For comparison, in habeas corpus cases, in which convicted criminal defendants argue that a state court violated their constitutional rights:
About 63% of issues raised in habeas corpus petitions by state court prisoners are dismissed on procedural grounds at the U.S. District Court level, and about 35% of those issues are dismissed based on the allegations in the petition on the merits.
About 2% afford some positive relief such as having the case "remanded" to a state court for further proceedings. And, not all of them ultimately prevail on the merits.
The vast majority of habeas corpus cases are pro se prisoner's petitions. But probably more than half of the 2% of cases where a habeas corpus petition is successful involved the 1-2% of prisoners who were represented by a lawyer in connection with a case where the death penalty or life in prison was imposed as a sentence (they had a little less than a 50% chance of success). So, in that quite parallel situation, the odds of a pro se party succeeding are less than 1%.
A freestanding civil lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a local ordinance has a greater chance of success than that, but only slightly better.
While the filing fees and out of pocket costs might be minimal, there is a real risk of having your litigation found to be groundless or frivolous, or being sanctioned for violating some procedural rule and being sanctioned with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to compensate the defendant. There is probably at least a 1/3rd chance that a pro se party bringing this kind of lawsuit will be sanctioned and forced to pay some or all of the other side's attorney fees at some point.
Even if you aren't sanctioned, you will at least have to pay the local government's out of pocket costs including expert witness fees, which will frequently run to thousands or low tens of thousands of dollars. Indeed, often, a local government's attorneys will hire an expert witness, even if they didn't really need to, precisely to put the pressure of financial hardship on you if you lose. And, if they have an expert witness and you don't have an expert witness to rebut that witness, your already meager chances of success plummet.
Hiring an expert witness takes considerable skill, adds procedural complexity, and will usually cost from $5,000 to $50,000 depending upon the issues involved and the rarity of the kind of expertise required to render an opinion in the case. And, expert witnesses generally need to be paid up front. They almost never work on a contingent fee or pro bono (i.e. free for charitable reasons) basis, even when a lawyer might. And, as a pro se party, you can't be awarded any compensation for your own time and expense (other than out of pocket "court costs" just as filing fees and photocopying cost and expert witness fees) even if you win.
U.S. District Courts are also a pretty slow forum in most of the United States (although there is considerable region variation).
It would probably take nine to twenty-four months for a case like this to run its course. A lawsuit like this would probably take at least 100 hours of lawyer time, but would take maybe three times as many hours for a pro se party who is inefficient about everything and making a good faith effort to figure it out for the first time, assuming that you are college educated. People with PhDs struggle to do the necessary research, motion practice, and complaint drafting in that time, and a lack of access to paid legal research resources, legal treatises on civil procedure, and e-filing in the court, puts a pro se party at a serious disadvantage.
Someone with only a high school education, or only an associate's degree in a non-law related field, who has never worked in a law firm, more likely than not, cannot produce meaningfully effective legal work product sufficient to bring a case like this one, no matter how hard they try, and how many hours they put into it. It would be more time effective for someone like that to get a college degree, go to law school, and pass the bar, than to figure out a single case to have an ordinance held unconstitutional on their own.
If you are seriously considering this, you are a textbook example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, i.e. you aren't knowledgable enough to realize that your abilities aren't up to the task.
The difficulty of winning a simple foreclosure or debt collection action is on the same order of magnitude as building a cabin with running water and a septic system by yourself, or rebuilding an engine from a badly broken one you find in a junk yard.
The difficulty involved in winning a lawsuit to have a local ordinance declared unconstitutional is on the same order of magnitude as building a ten story apartment building by yourself when the land isn't initially zoned for multi-family residences.
In conclusion: DON'T DO IT.
If you can't afford to hire a top notch lawyer to represent you, you shouldn't even consider bringing a lawsuit like this one by yourself. You are better off urging some interest group or activist group, perhaps the ACLU, or perhaps some other group more suited to the issues presented in the case. If you can't convince a group like that to take up your case, it is almost surely too weak of a case for you to win pro se.
A pro se constitutional challenge to a local ordinance is probably not going to be very expensive or time consuming.
Because you're representing yourself, you'll probably lose very quickly -- most likely on standing or immunity grounds -- so you won't have a chance to spend much time or money on the project.
The only way it's likely to become a major time drain is if you've actually prepared yourself to win, which would entail learning constitutional law, plus the law of remedies, plus the rules of civil procedure, plus the rules of evidence, plus the court's local rules, plus your judge's standing orders. Law students typically do this in three years, but you can expect it to take you much longer because you don't have dozens of experts helping you.
There are also additional costs likely to come up as the case progresses: the cost of service of process on all the defendants, the cost of subpoenas, the cost of taking and transcribing depositions, etc. And if you lose, you'll probably be obligated to pay all those costs for the other side.
Winning cases is a full-time job for real lawyers who already know what they're doing, so pro se litigants should expect to spend at least that much time if they hope to be successful.
In good news, the mechanism for challenging these laws includes provisions for fee-shifting, so lawyers who work in this area often do so on a contingency basis. If you can't find a lawyer who is willing to take the case, that is decent indicator that your case is not as strong as you might hope.
