Alright, so getting a legal education isn't easy. Admittance to the bar takes years, and the test is non-trivial. (You can't just waltz in with a high IQ and expect to pass without serious study. You can't bullshit your way past it.) Still, everybody's familiar with the stereotype of the scatterbrained and incompetent public defender...
Now, take that stereotype and raise it by a couple orders of magnitude and you've got the average pro se litigant. It's almost impossible to "skip past" those years of study and practice, and just litigate your own case as though you were a lawyer. Most pro se litigants have literally no clue what they're doing, and they often end up relying on coaching from the judge (which raises fairness issues) and from the opposing lawyer (which raises ethics issues) -- it almost never ends well.
Yet legal services, especially for defendants who are trying to protect themselves from unfair or frivolous accusations in civil court, are so often priced out of reach. So defenses are difficult and sometimes impossible to raise, and there are more than a few law firms who act as though they were mob enforcers.
There are two solutions which have been proposed:
1. In most small claims courts, both sides are prohibited from using lawyers, and legal proceedings are simplified and rooted more in common sense than established precedent. This practice could be extended to higher-value civil cases.
2. Establish a "right to representation" in all cases -- civil as well as criminal -- with public access to government-funded legal assistance. It has been argued that this might even save the government money, as pro se litigants are a severe drain on judicial resources, and this practice might weed out frivolous cases before they're even filed.
But, hell, the way things are going, legal services and even judges might soon become AI models, so who knows?
As for making frivolous cases expensive to bring forward: I think that judges should be quicker to sanction people (and corporations!) and label them "vexatious litigants," which would place limits on their ability to bring forward subsequent civil cases. That aside, I don't think that the pricetag of _anything_ associated with the legal system needs to be raised.
BTW: I am not a lawyer but have a philosophical interest in the theory and practice of law. There are lawyers here who surely know a lot more than I do.