Guided Pathway for requesting a court fee waiver

CLEO’s Guided Pathway for requesting a court fee waiver helps you fill out the forms you need to ask for a court fee waiver. A fee waiver means you don’t have to pay court fees, usually because your income is low.

The pathways ask you questions about your situation, give you information to help answer them, and creates documents based on your answers.

The pathways are free to use. When you’re finished, you can save or print your forms. You will also get instructions about how to give them to the court.

Who is this Guided Pathway for?

You can ask for a fee waiver if:

• you are or will be involved in a civil, small claims, or certain type of family law court case
• you’re not acting on behalf of a business or organization
• your fees are not being paid by a lawyer under a contingency fee agreement, which means you and your lawyer agreed that you’ll only pay them if your case is successful

You can also ask for a fee waiver if you’re acting as a litigation guardian for someone who is mentally incapable of representing themselves.

Usually, you’re eligible for a fee waiver if one or more of these situations applies to you:

• your total household income is low
• most of your income is from social assistance or other benefits
• your lawyer is being paid by a legal aid certificate

The pathway can help you determine if you’re eligible for a fee waiver. If you’re not eligible, the pathway can help you fill out a different form to request a fee waiver from a judge.

Using the pathway

It can take between 15 minutes and 1 hour to complete the pathway, depending on your situation.

You can sign up to create an account or use the pathway as a guest. If you choose not to create an account, the system will time out after 4 hours. You must create an account if you want to save your work on the system, or use the other pathways.

All of the information that you enter into the pathways is confidential. CLEO will not give your personal information to anyone unless you ask us to do this. Read more in the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Need help?

If you need help using the Guided Pathways or have questions, contact support@cleo.on.ca.