Pro Se Skillset: The Playbook

Also from Digital Dame Systems

The First-Week Kit and the Case Snapshot — two tools you can use in your first week. Free.

The Tutorial — includes the Playbook, plus the Claude skill and how it was built. $199.

The Setup Hour — a live lesson on the method. $100.

Everything — the Tutorial and the Setup Hour in one checkout. $299.

I brought an arbitration claim without a lawyer, because a lawyer would have cost more than an eventual award. What I found out is that the process is every bit as rigorous as a court case: deadlines that do not move, procedural rules I had to go and find myself, and experienced counsel on the other side who does this for a living. I am not a lawyer. I organize things for a living. This book is the map I wish somebody had given me when I began.

150 pages, five parts and a set of tools.

PART ONE — THE WHOLE ROAD. What a case looks like from filing to decision, in eight phases: what happens, what ends each phase, where people get hurt, and where to stop and get a lawyer.

PART TWO — THE METHOD. How to work: finding and reading sources, the four running lists that keep a case straight, outlining before drafting, and checking a draft before it goes out.

PART THREE — PHASE BY PHASE. The method moving through time, with a fictional case worked through beside it from filing to award, so you can watch it run.

PART FOUR — READING YOUR FORUM RULES. One rule set read properly, start to finish. I use the arbitration rules I lived under as the specimen — not because you are likely to be in that forum, but because reading a rule set is a skill, and a skill is easier to learn by watching it done once on something specific.

PART FIVE — WHAT THE PHASES COST EACH OTHER. How a choice made early is paid for later.

THE TOOLS. Every form, list and template in the book, ready to print — including both free guides, reprinted in full.

Where something is mine — a decision I made, a mistake that cost me, something I would do differently — it sits in a box marked My experience, in my voice. That is a fact about what happened to me. It is not a forecast about what will happen to you.

Who it is for: self-represented people in any forum, court or arbitration, who want a method rather than a form pack.

What it will not do: tell you what the law is, promise you a result, or replace a lawyer when you need one. The book names the moments to stop and get one.

Delivered as a PDF, instantly, at checkout.

There is also a Tutorial: this book plus the way I actually used an AI tool to run my case, and the Claude skill built out of it. If you buy this book, the $49 comes off the Tutorial — the code comes with your download.