The term “triage” is usually reserved for the
process hospitals use to sort out the order in which patients will be treated
based on the urgency of their wounds or illnesses. Much like hospitals, legal aid offices can be
overwhelmed with people who urgently need their assistance. The triage concept can be adapted to the legal
field to make better use of limited resources, just as it is used in the
medical profession.
The Guide to Legal Help
Our version of triage at Michigan Legal Help
is known as the “Guide to Legal Help.” It
officially went live on October 6, 2017, and can be accessed at several points
on the website, including a link at the top of the page and a pop-up that
initiates an interaction with a visitor who is browsing the website. Users can also be directed to this guide
through our online chat service called “Live Help.”
The Guide consists of five stages of questions
and takes visitors about a minute and a half to complete. About 115 people finish the Guide per day. Seventy percent of visitors who begin the
Guide continue on to complete it, indicating that the tool is easy to use. The questions gather information on many
different demographic factors, including whether or not the visitor is a senior,
veteran, farmworker, tribal member, or disabled person.
The Guide also provides different options for
inputting household income, allowing the user to list their income in a weekly,
bi-weekly, monthly, or yearly format. The
Guide then helps the visitor identify their legal problem, eventually providing
specific answer options such as “I want to file for divorce” or “I have
received a Notice to Quit and am being evicted from subsidized housing for
non-payment of rent.”
After all the questions are answered, the
visitor is presented a results page with a variety of resources. This may include content on Michigan Legal
Help related to their particular legal problem, referrals to legal aid, and/or
links to the state and local bar associations’ lawyer referral service. Links to information on public assistance
programs such as food stamps and cash assistance will also be provided if the
user may qualify for them, and appropriate referrals to mediation services,
domestic violence shelters, and other resources are included for visitors who
have identified a need for them.
A primary benefit of the Guide is that it only
directs users to the resources that are most likely to help them, avoiding
wasted time and frustration. For
example, the Guide does not direct users who are ineligible for legal aid services
to legal aid services; instead, such users will be directed to the private bar,
including their new resources for Free Legal Answers and Modest Means panels. To fully experience the Guide to Legal Help,
give it a try yourself!
Visitors and the Guide to Legal
Help
People from every county in Michigan use the
Guide, with the bulk of them coming from the most populous counties in the
state (Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Kent, and Genesee). The answers these visitors submit can be used
to analyze their demographics and learn more about how they use our website. For example, 78 percent of users who have
completed the Guide are at or below 200 percent of the Federal Poverty Level,
qualifying them for legal aid at most offices. We find this encouraging as it assures us we
are reaching our intended population, which includes both low- and moderate-income
individuals and families.
One question in the Guide asks the visitors
what their primary goal is: to find information about their legal problem;,
to get a form for their legal problem;,
or to find a lawyer. We have learned
that visitors come to us for each of these three services fairly equally. This confirms that the variety of services
provided by Michigan Legal Help are all needed by the population with which we
are interacting.
The Guide to Legal Help can also tell us which
legal categories our users are interested in most. The majority of them come
for our family law content (54 percent), with housing (17 percent) and money
and debt (10 percent) being the second and third most popular. The metrics derived from the answers our users
submit can be used to monitor the website’s effectiveness, usability, and
content areas that are most in demand. We’re
looking forward to taking an even deeper dive into the data to find out more
about the people we are helping.
The Future of the Guide
We are very proud of what we have created, but
we are not done yet. The Guide to Legal
Help is currently going through some exciting changes. Soon the Guide will be fully integrated with
online intake for legal aid. This means
that after a visitor finishes the Guide to Legal Help, if they are referred to
a legal aid office they can submit their application online. This enables more people to submit their
applications since it can be done at any time of day or night. This also saves time for both the clients and
the legal aid staff who no longer have to do the lengthy intake process in
person or over the phone.
The Guide will soon be fully integrated with
each legal aid office’s case management system as well, meaning that clients will
not have to duplicate information because all relevant answers are passed from
the Guide to the online intake application they are completing.
We are also partnering with the State Bar of
Michigan to integrate with their online lawyer search and online lawyer
referral service (coming soon). When
visitors are referred to these resources, they will be delivered directly to
the search results they need based on their location and the type of lawyer
they are seeking.
The Guide also refers appropriate visitors to
the State Bar’s income-restricted services, including the Free Legal Answers
program and the new Modest Means panel pilot project. These added capabilities will increase the
efficiency of all partners and help direct people to the one or two resources
most likely to assist them by creating a unified system of referrals.
Michigan Legal Help’s goal is to be a valuable
source of information for self-represented litigants in our state. The Guide to Legal Help is a direct extension
of the website created with the intention of furthering this mission. The Guide has not only helped us increase the
usability of the website, but also has helped us determine what our users need
from us. The integrations of online
intake and State Bar resources will allow us to help our target population more
efficiently, saving time that can be better spent assisting more people who
need our services. The Guide to Legal
Help has been a successful innovation to our model, the benefits of which we
hope will continue to be seen.