It will be hilarious to see this one play out because ChatGPT and Perplexity already do wonders for small-claim issues like tenancy laws, various personal letters, etc.
I would love this for poor people to fight giant corporations via 'lawfare'. It's largely unethical (just like many corporations) but just knowing how to file junk lawsuits that cost corporations millions to fight would be nice.
I dont mean 'frivolous' like prisoners who file pro-se about their ice cream melting [1], but a level or two above that , that costs time and money to produce records and testimony to defend, even if nary a dime is paid out. Basically ask GPT to figure out the terms and theories to file to get your lawsuit accepted, and done by poor people who cannot afford to post $ or repay if they lose. aka "asymmetric warfare" that benefits the little guy, just like the kind private equity or other terrible corporations wield against the poor via"mandatory arbitration" clauses or damages caps and similar rules that always benefit corporations.
It's already doing wonders for small time businesses and individuals that municipalities think they're free to jerk around because the size of the screwing they're trying to dish out isn't worth hiring a lawyer and/or fighting through court over.
I assure you, in most democracies, most people are jerked around by other people acting in bad faith far more often than their government acting in bad faith.
Landlords, tenants, vendors, business and former romantic partners, clients, banks, even your local gym is way more likely to try to fuck you over than the government is.
The government is just people. Even before the current fiasco, the government had varying degrees of incompetence and malice, and if you're poor you can't do anything about it since the government is presumed to have been operating in good faith and you can't afford a lawyer or the time off work to try to fix it pro se.
I'd invite you to ask a few poor people what happened the last time the government "definitely sent" some important document or another in the mail.
If a governmental employee gets the address wrong, gets the name wrong, accidentally knocks the mail in the trash, lazily marks the job as complete without sending anything, etc, the burden shifts to the poor person to prove not just that they didn't receive the mail but that the sending office didn't behave correctly.
Other cases behave similarly. In a he-said/she-said, the government wins.
Nothing you described is unique to the government. If you miss paying your power bill or a medical bill for similar reasons, you're going to have problems. And you receive a lot more demands for money from people who aren't the government than you do from it.
You can sue both in small claims court. You don't need money or a lawyer for that.
I dont mean 'frivolous' like prisoners who file pro-se about their ice cream melting [1], but a level or two above that , that costs time and money to produce records and testimony to defend, even if nary a dime is paid out. Basically ask GPT to figure out the terms and theories to file to get your lawsuit accepted, and done by poor people who cannot afford to post $ or repay if they lose. aka "asymmetric warfare" that benefits the little guy, just like the kind private equity or other terrible corporations wield against the poor via"mandatory arbitration" clauses or damages caps and similar rules that always benefit corporations.
1. https://www.deseret.com/1994/3/21/19098386/melted-ice-cream-...