About Self Rep Ready

What this is

Self Rep Ready publishes practical systems for a moment when clear thinking is difficult: a legal letter has arrived, a court date is approaching, or the paperwork has outgrown the kitchen table. The guides cover preserving documents, understanding unfamiliar processes, organising facts, using AI carefully, and preparing one verifiable next step. They are meant for the common fights: a separation and what follows it, a will or an estate, a property or neighbour dispute, a debt, a job, a contract. The aim is that nobody loses simply because the other side had a lawyer and they did not.

The material is general information and education. The method applies anywhere in Australia. Where a guide quotes a court's rules, the rule numbers are those of New South Wales, because that is where the author learned them, and the page says so. Every guide carries one of three labels: Australia for method that does not depend on any court's rules; Australia · check your court for concepts every court has but numbers differently; NSW where the page quotes NSW rules and you should find your own court's equivalent. Family law is federal and runs under its own rules in every state; the NSW-labelled pages describe state civil courts, and the method pages apply to both.

Who writes it

Ash Callaghan writes this site. I am not a lawyer, hold no legal qualification, and am not admitted to practise anywhere. This is general information drawn from research and lived experience, written in plain language — not advice about your matter.

The methods on this site come from lived experience of managing legal correspondence and self-representation in NSW civil proceedings, reorganised into general systems and stripped of anything that belongs to a real matter. The site is about the reader, not the author; nothing from any real matter, mine included, appears on it.

Legal statements on the site are checked against primary sources before publication and carry a review date. Where a page has been reviewed by a NSW solicitor, it says so on the page. Until then, treat every legal statement as the author's careful reading of a public source, not a professional opinion.

The worked examples

The worked examples follow an invented self-represented litigant, Jordan Lee, in a fictional dispute with a building company, Meridian Builders Pty Ltd. Jordan is not me and is not anyone: the litigant, the company, the director, the solicitors, the dates, proceeding numbers, letters and events are all invented to show how a method works. They are not an account of anything that happened to any real person. Any resemblance to a real person, company or matter is unintended.

What we do not do

• No personal legal advice. Not on the site, not by email, not in any other channel. If you write to us about your situation, we will point you to people who can help and will not answer the question.
• No predictions. We do not say what a court, registrar, mediator or other party will do.
• No accounts, no comments, no forms. There is nothing to sign up to.
• No real case material. The site contains no real correspondence, affidavits, transcripts or discovery from any matter, including the author's.

Report an error

If a guide states a rule wrongly, links to a source that has moved, or reads in a way that could lead someone astray, please tell us. Email selfrepready@gmail.com with the page name and what you think is wrong. We aim to reply within 48 hours and to correct the page or add a note. Corrections change the review date on the page.

The same address is the right place for suggestions, and for lawyers or community services who want to tell us how a guide could serve their clients better.

Free website resources and book rights

The website is free to use. Its guides, prompts, checklists and companion downloads are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence. In plain words:

• You may copy, print, share and adapt the guides, prompts and checklists.
• You must say they came from Self Rep Ready and link back if you can.
• You may not sell them or use them in a commercial product.
• If you adapt them, you must share your version under the same licence.

Community legal centres, libraries, courts and support services are welcome to hand the guides out, print them, or host copies. You do not need to ask.

The book is sold separately

The complete Self Rep Ready book, in print or as a full-book PDF, is not a free website resource. The website licence does not cover the complete book, its cover or book-only content. Those rights are reserved, subject to applicable copyright exceptions. For permissions, contact selfrepready@gmail.com.

Material previously released under CC BY-NC-SA keeps that licence, including where it also appears in the book. Buying the book is never a condition of accessing the free website or companion tools.

Privacy

The site sets no cookies and runs no tracking script in your browser. There are no accounts and no forms. To see which guides are being read, we use page counts produced by our hosting provider on its own servers: how many times a page was requested and roughly where visitors came from. Nothing runs on your device, no profile of you is built, and we cannot see who you are. If you email us, we keep the message only for as long as it takes to reply and act on it. Prompts on this site are used in whichever AI tool you choose; what you upload there is governed by that tool's terms, and every prompt page reminds you to check confidentiality and court restrictions before uploading anything.

Review dates

Every guide carries a "Last reviewed" date. Court rules, practice notes, service details and software interfaces change. A review date tells you when we last checked the page against its sources, and nothing more. If the date is old, check the primary source yourself before relying on the page.

Saying thanks

If a page helped, the best thanks is an email saying which page and what was missing. That is how the site gets better. Please do not send details of your own matter; the address cannot give advice and will not reply to it, but Get help lists people who can.

If you would like to buy the site a coffee, you can at ko-fi.com/selfrepready. It changes nothing: every page stays free, and nobody gets anything extra for it.