Martha Gove, Staff Attorney/Program & Outreach Coordinator, Michigan Legal Help Program
Sometimes the
best way to understand how others experience your product is to be your own
customer. Michigan Legal Help staff
recently conducted user testing to get real-time, in-person feedback about the
website – its layout, wording, and the new features we’re adding. Similarly, an attorney colleague recently used
Michigan Legal Help to represent herself in her divorce, moving through the
courts for the first time as a self-represented litigant instead of as an
attorney. What she had to say about the
experience was as illuminating as any user testing we could have done, and
speaks a great deal to the experiences of self-represented litigants.
To court
staff, self-represented litigants may seem disorganized, misinformed, and
confused. What these litigants would
tell us is that they are also intimidated and overwhelmed, and feel like they
are at the mercy of every court staff person with whom they interact. They may also feel humiliated, because they
had to remove their shoes and belt at the security line when they thought they
had emptied their pockets of metal.
My colleague’s
story involved a very simple divorce, one with a consent judgment that
plaintiff and defendant agreed to and signed. Even so, she could not schedule the final
court date or file the motion/notice of hearing without talking to three
different people. She soon discovered
she had been given a wrong date, which required another trip to the courthouse,
complete with security screening, because only the clerk could correct the
notice of hearing for her. Luckily,
because she has a Bar card, my colleague could take her phone into the
courthouse with her to make sure she didn’t have a work conflict on the new
proposed hearing date. After the final
hearing, the process to get a signed copy of the judgment of divorce was cryptic
and involved going to the judge’s clerk’s office rather than the main clerk’s
office. My colleague had to navigate
these hurdles while doing one of the most personal and difficult things she has
had to do: end her marriage.
Her story
struck me for several reasons. First,
it is easy for us to forget that the people on the other side of the website,
or the bench or desk, are individuals who are just trying to live through a
very difficult personal crisis that involves the legal system. In our work, it is
easy to let them blend into an unending, confused, and confusing blur. We are all well served to
stop and
consider their humanity from time to time.
Second, I am reminded
that providing procedural instructions is one of our biggest challenges on
Michigan Legal Help. Specific
instructions are what people need to feel comfortable, to calm nerves, to make
them feel confident and in control of the process. And yet it is hard to provide accurate
information, even with all our research, because so many courts and judges have
their own preferred processes. As a
result, the best-researched checklist on MLH is often useless. Is there a better way for MLH to handle this? We’d love to hear from you!
Third, and
related to the first two, is the concept of simplifying the court process,
which is often discussed in the context of self-represented litigants. Some barriers to self-representation are
security related and may be harder to implement. However, given the number of people who rely
on electronic calendars, is there a way to allow people to bring their phones
into court? Other barriers may be easier
to remove. For example, the divorce
paperwork says “Circuit Court” at the top, but this may need to be filed with a
“Domestic Clerk.” Can courthouse signage
help people get to the right desk? Must
there be separate offices for scheduling and filing? Are there ways to move simple cases (consent
divorces, for example) through the courts in fewer steps?
Simplification
of some court processes was a goal that came out of the 21st
Century Practice Task Force, and efforts are
already underway. The Self-Represented
Litigation Network has a Simplification Work
Group,
and the National Center for State Courts has resources on Rule
and Process Simplification. These concepts may already be under discussion
in your courts, and I encourage you to join the conversation and keep it moving
forward. This is a movement that can
improve the experience for both litigants and courts, and I invite you to
involve us at Michigan Legal Help as well.
We are very
comfortable in the worlds we inhabit and the routines of our workplaces. But complacency may keep us from identifying
weaknesses. Getting input from outsiders
can be very productive. We did this at
Michigan Legal Help recently, when a group of University of Michigan School of
Information students studied the processes we use in the office and provided
recommendations for improvements. This
type of fresh look, particularly from the eyes of our customers, is always an
interesting experience and worth every moment spent.
Contact Michigan Legal Help at http://michiganlegalhelp.org/contact-us.