Apparently, Virginia needs to go back to school when it comes to its score with small claims courts.

HALT, an organization of Americans for Legal Reform, recently released its Small Claims Report Card for the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Virginia is one of the four states to receive an overall grade of F and has the third worst score out of the 47 jurisdictions with small claims courts. Virginia’s small claims dollar limit of $1,000 is the lowest in the country.

Although the General Assembly passed a bill to raise the limit to $2,000, the new legislation, if signed into law by the governor, would only raise Virginia’s limit to the fourth lowest in the country.

Tom Gordon, HALT’s associate counsel and director of the Small Claim Reform Project, said, “Virginia’s small claims dollar limit is so low that it restricts access to small claims courts to the most trivial of cases. Everyday, people have disputes over amounts 10 times greater than those allowed in Virginia’s small claims courts, but have no means of resolving them without the prohibitive cost of hiring an attorney.”

Data for the survey was collected by a telephone survey of a sampling of small claims courts in the four largest counties and six other randomly selected counties in each state. (Fauquier County was not one of the counties polled.)

For example, Virginia received a grade of D for mediation, but Fauquier has an active, free-of-charge mediation program.

The survey was conducted over four months in late 2001.

A copy of the small claims report card is available from HALT at http://www.halt.org.