A simplified court for lower-value disputes, designed to be used without a lawyer - and in some states lawyers are not allowed in it at all.
Small claims court is a division of the ordinary civil court system with its procedure deliberately stripped down. Filing fees are low, the forms are short, the formal rules of evidence are relaxed or set aside, and pre-trial discovery is usually limited or unavailable. The design goal is that an ordinary person can bring or defend a case without representation, and the courts that run these dockets generally publish their own plain-language guides and forms.
Every state sets a maximum amount that can be claimed, and the figures differ widely between states - some sit in the low thousands, others substantially higher. Claiming more than the limit is not usually fatal: a claimant can normally waive the excess and sue for the maximum instead, which is a trade of money for speed and simplicity. What cannot be done is splitting one dispute into several cases to get around the ceiling.
What these courts can order is narrower than people expect. They award money. Most cannot order a person to do something or stop doing something, which means a dispute whose real remedy is an injunction generally does not belong here. Some states restrict or prohibit lawyers appearing, at least at the first hearing, and some allow an appeal that is heard entirely afresh in a higher court rather than as a review of what the first judge did.
Winning is a separate question from being paid. A small claims judgment is a judgment like any other and it does not collect itself; if the defendant does not pay voluntarily, enforcement is a further process with its own steps and costs. That consideration belongs at the start, when deciding whether the case is worth bringing, rather than after the hearing.
The honest answer is usually that you do not need one, which is the point of the forum - and in several states you could not bring one anyway. Advice is still worth buying in three situations: when you are the defendant and the claim could have been brought for far more elsewhere, when the dispute is really about an ongoing obligation rather than a sum of money, and when the other side is a business that appears in this court regularly and you do not. Many courts run a free self-help centre or a duty advisor, and a legal aid programme will often give a short consultation on a small claims matter even where it cannot take the case.
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