Friday, September 21, 2018

Six Years and Counting: The Story of the Michigan Legal Help Program

By Ramzi Badwi, Program and Outreach Coordinator, Michigan Legal Help


The Legal Climate in 2010

On August 17, MichiganLegalHelp.org celebrated its 6th birthday!  In honor of that milestone, this article will explore the origin of Michigan Legal Help (MLH) and how far it has come since then. 


First and foremost, MLH is a resource for self-represented litigants (SRLs).

In 2010, Michigan courts were seeing many SRLs, and the same is true today; however, in 2010 the resources available to these litigants were often disjointed, outdated, and incomplete.  These resources were not very well adapted to the Internet either.  Most of the forms provided were simple PDFs and the websites were not being properly maintained and updated.  In addition to less than satisfactory forms, there was also a lack of quality educational resources informing SRLs about their legal issue or procedure of interest.  There were only three staffed, brick-and-mortar legal assistance centers in the state: those in Berrien, Kent, and Washtenaw counties.

A further obstacle for SRLs at this time was that Michigan did not yet have an “unbundling” ethics rule that would allow a lawyer to perform individual tasks for a client while not taking responsibility for their entire case.  Unbundling can allow the client to have much more affordable attorney fees while still receiving quality assistance from a professional.  This procedure was already allowed in other states at the time, but was not yet sanctioned in Michigan.

The Birth of MLH

Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Marilyn Kelly noticed these shortcomings and decided that something had to change.  In April 2010, she created the Solutions on Self-Help Task Force in order to “promote greater centralization, coordination and quality of support for the self-represented in Michigan.”  Chief Justice Kelly advocated for these changes in the legal system with the belief that they would increase the public’s faith and confidence in the legal system, increase the efficiency of the legal process, and lighten administrative burdens on the court.  She recommended six different actions to reach this goal; one of which was to create a statewide website dedicated to SRLs and modeled after IllinoisLegalAid.org.  This website eventually grew into MichiganLegalHelp.org.

In August 2012, the MLH website was launched with much of the functionality that it currently has. It provided toolkits, articles, and do-it-yourself form tools for common legal issues and procedures in civil law, and also exhibited a feature that allowed visitors to find lawyers and community service organizations near them.  When the website initially launched its content was organized into five categories: Consumer, Family, Protection Orders, Landlord/Tenant, and Expungement.  

By April 2013, the website already had more than 500,000 page views and provided 26 toolkits, 70 articles, 290 common questions (with answers), and 13 DIY forms.  Toolkits available at that time included: “I Need a Personal Protection Order”; “I Need a Divorce”; “I’m Being Evicted for Non-Payment of Rent”; and “I Have an Adult Conviction That I Would Like to Set Aside.”  Contained within the appropriate toolkits were DIY form tools for divorce, expungement, personal protection orders, and more.  By this time, MLH had also launched self-help centers in Oscoda, Allegan, Oakland, and Wayne counties.  Self-help centers are physical locations of the Michigan Legal Help Program, often contained within libraries and courthouses, where visitors can get free access to the Internet, computers, and printers, and help navigating the website.  As you can see, MLH was launched with a strong foundation that we continue to build on today.

Expanding on Our Mission

Michigan Legal Help is still being guided by the same goal as when it began: to provide a free, accurate, and accessible source of legal information for those who do not have legal representation. Furthermore, Michigan Legal Help strives to provide legal information on the topics most relevant to our audience: low-income Michigan residents.  In this regard, the website has vastly improved upon what was offered in 2012.  

Currently, as of September 2018, MichiganLegalHelp.org provides a total of 64 toolkits, 237 articles, 730 common questions (with answers) and 49 do-it-yourself tools that generate 149 possible forms. The legal issues and procedures we now cover include topics such as domestic violence and divorce, revoking paternity established by marriage, illegal eviction, and many more.  Between the launch of the website on August 17, 2012, and July 31, 2018, the website received more than 15.2 million page views.  From January 1 to June 30, 2018, alone, our DIY form tools were used to generate more than 46,000 sets of forms, with an average of 256 sets of forms generated per day.

We have not only been adding more traditional content but also improving the website’s functionality. In June 2013, we optimized MichiganLegalHelp.org for mobile devices.  We now see this as a core part of our philosophy.  Research shows that low-income Internet users are more likely to access the Internet exclusively through a mobile device and less likely to have broadband Internet at home. Being optimized for mobile devices helps us stay connected to our target audience and facilitate our original mission. In September 2013, we launched LiveHelp, our online chat service dedicated to helping visitors navigate the website in real time.

As another extension of our mission, the Michigan Legal Help Program launched our Spanish mirror site, AyudaLegaldeMichigan.org, in September 2014.  This is a website with Spanish language versions of all of our content from MichiganLegalHelp.org.  

Yet another step toward increasing our usability came with the addition of the Guide to Legal Help in October 2017.  The Guide is an online legal triage system through which visitors answer a handful of questions concerning their demographic factors, eligibility for services, the type of legal issue they are experiencing, and the urgency of their legal problem.  All of this data is used to give the user personalized information about their legal issue and refer them to direct services from an appropriate attorney (legal services or private bar) or other professional.  The Guide to Legal Help is currently being integrated with every Michigan legal aid office’s case management system.

Once the integration is complete, visitors eligible for legal aid will be able to fill out the online intake application immediately after they’ve completed the Guide to Legal Help.  All of their answers will be transferred there so that they do not have to enter the same information twice.  This function is already live in some parts of the state, and we hope to have the entire state integrated by the end of the year.  We also continue to open new self-help centers across the state and can now proudly say that we have 18 Michigan Legal Self-Help Centers and 4 partnering Legal Resource Centers, covering a total of 21 counties—just over a quarter of the state.  We are honored to have been able to serve self-represented litigants in Michigan for the last six years and look forward to continuing to do so for many more.