Guided Pathway to make a claim

CLEO’s Guided Pathway for making a Plaintiff’s Claim is for people who want to learn more about Small Claims Court, or start the process to sue someone in Small Claims Court. You can go to Small Claims Court if you want to make a claim for $50,000 or less, or you want to get back goods or personal property worth $50,000 or less.

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.

There are many different reasons why people go to Small Claims Court. Some of the most common reasons are:

• You suffered an injury because someone was negligent.
• You signed an agreement with someone and they didn’t do what they promised.
• You hired someone to do repairs, renovations, or construction and they did a bad job.
• Someone didn’t pay you for goods or services you provided to them.
• You lent someone money and they didn’t pay you back.
• Someone damaged your property.

There are issues that you can take to Small Claims Court, but you may not want to. This is because there are other organizations that have expertise in dealing with these types of issues. Two examples are discrimination and human rights claims, and employment claims. The pathway explains where you can get help with these problems, if you choose not to go to Small Claims Court.

There are issues that you cannot take to Small Claims Court because the court doesn’t deal with them. Two examples are immigration and refugee claims, and most rental housing claims. The pathway explains where you can get help with these problems.

You can use this pathway if:

What you need to get started:

you want to fill out a Plaintiff’s Claim (Form 7A) to sue someone in Small Claims Court for $50,000 or less you want to fill out a Plaintiff’s Claim (Form 7A) to sue someone in Small Claims Court to get back your goods or personal property worth $50,000 or less you want to learn more about Small Claims Court, including the types of claims you can make and important deadlines for starting your claim you want help to figure out how easy or hard it may be to collect your money if you win your case. You may not want to go to Small Claims Court if you already know the person you want to sue has no money or valuable assets.

the full legal name and address of the person or organization you want to sue. If you want to sue more than one party, you need the contact information for all of them. the amount of money you want to ask for, or the value and a description of the goods or personal property you want returned to you the facts about what happened that led to your claim, including what, where, and when it happened a list of supporting documents to help prove your claim like contracts, emails, and photos If you want to use the pathway to learn more about Small Claims Court, you don’t need any information to start.

Using the pathway

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 1 hour of inactivity. You must create an account if you want to save your work on the system or use the other pathways.

Any personal 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 our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy

Need help?

If you need help using the Guided Pathways or have questions, visit our FAQs page.