Friday, December 21, 2018

Crafting a Better Self-Help Center

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


Humble Beginnings

MichiganLegalHelp.org is a website designed to provide legal information for self-represented litigants. The Michigan Legal Help Program (MLHP), although largely known for its website, has another, equally important aspect – its self-help centers (SHCs).  Self-help centers are brick-and-mortar extensions of MichiganLegalHelp.org – places where visitors can get free access to a computer and a high-speed Internet connection in order to use the website.  


In addition, each center is staffed with navigators who assist visitors with using the website and finding the information they need.  Courts in communities with SHCs report great satisfaction with the noticeable benefits they provide to self-represented litigants and court functions.

The Michigan Legal Help website officially launched in August of 2012.  By November of that same year, four SHCs had already been established in Allegan, Oakland, Oscoda, and Wayne Counties.  Four other self-help centers (Kent, Berrien, Ottawa, and Washtenaw Counties) existed before Michigan Legal Help.  Just over five years later, in 2017, the MLHP had a total of 18 centers within its network but had yet to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of them.  

In light of this, Angela Tripp, the director of the MLHP, invited Bridgeport Consulting to evaluate MLHP’s self-help centers and the related network via a national scan of SHC models and best practices, followed by interviews with both MLHP-affiliated and non-affiliated SHCs in Michigan.  We encourage court staff to review the entire report and to consider the benefit a local SHC might have in their community.

Self-Help Centers Across the Nation

The Michigan Legal Help Program SHCs are far from the only ones in existence; in fact, there are about 500 SHCs across the country.  To better understand the Michigan Legal Help Program’s centers and how to improve them, let’s briefly explore the general landscape of SHCs.  We will do this using the 2014 Self-Help Center Census conducted by the American Bar Association.  This census included responses from 222 centers in the United States from 31 states.  Here are some noteworthy conclusions:

     American self-help centers serve almost 3.7 million people a year. 

     The most popular substantive areas of law covered by these self-help centers were family law (88 percent), child support (82 percent), and domestic violence (78 percent).

     About 33 percent of SHCs reported that they had just one full-time equivalent employee.

     Fifty-one percent% of centers used volunteers.  Of these centers, about 55% utilized attorney volunteers and about 45 percent utilized college student volunteers.

     Forty-nine percent of SHCs received funding from courts, making it the most popular funding source.  Courts were the most popular primary source of funding as well, accounting for 4 percent of SHCs in the census.

For more information, please view the Self-Help Center Census by the American Bar Association.

MLHP’s Self-Help Center Network

Each one of the Michigan Legal Help Program’s SHCs are based on one of two models, either the library/community-based model or the court-based model.  As the name suggests, library/community-based SHCs are housed within a library or community organization and depend on the host organization to be its main support system.  

This model usually receives very little outside funding, utilizing the pre-existing library or community organization staff to act as navigators for the center.  One of this model’s strengths is its low cost to operate.  The library model also benefits from the fact that the center is contained within an institution already associated with education and respected within the community.  Some of the shortcomings of this model include its relative inability to handle heavy visitor traffic and its ineffectiveness at providing high-intensity services.  These are both due to its multipurposing of staff and little use of external resources or funding.

In contrast to the library/community-based model, there is the court-based model.  By nature, court-based centers are more closely tied to the courts by both location and financial support.  They receive funding either from the court or the county and are housed within the courthouse and friend of the court (FOC) offices.  They often have a small staff dedicated to the center and supplement this staff with volunteers. 

The main strengths of this model include its ability to handle high levels of traffic and its proximity to the courts.  Clients are able to easily visit the center before or after visiting the court or FOC office.  Some of the shortcomings of this model are the higher cost to operate and that accessibility is sometimes hindered by the court or FOC’s security and hours of operation.

It is worth noting that the court and library/community model types reflect the specific details of the center itself and not the support system that envelopes it.  All of the MLHP’s centers exist within the same system.  The SHC network is mostly a loose confederation in the sense that each center has quite a bit of autonomy.  Each makes decisions such as the location of their workstations, the members of their planning committee, and their approach to public relations.  However, they follow a single set of operating protocols that act as guidelines to ensure consistent, quality service and use of the resources on the Michigan Legal Help website.

Bridgeport’s report included a total of seven recommendations to the Michigan Legal Help Program to help our centers better serve their visitors.  Most of these recommendations could be summarized by two core suggestions.  The first would be to advocate for increased court support for self-help centers to allow them to continue providing currently offered services as well as offer new ones, such as assistance with e-filing.  The second would be to foster a more data-driven, efficient, and collaborative network and expand this network to yet-unserved portions of the state.

The Michigan Legal Help Program has already begun implementing many of these suggestions.  The most evident are its efforts to create a more involved, tight-knit community of SHCs.  These efforts include engaging navigators by providing monthly webinars that aim to educate self-help center staff on substantive law topics and general tips for better center administration.  The webinars provided so far include a lecture by Michael Kiehne, Michigan Legal Help’s own staff attorney, on expungement, including an overview of the legal process and factors considered in eligibility. Annette Wells, the Executive Director of Community Mediation Services, also gave a presentation on mediation, including an overview of the process, the types of cases that are mediated, and how to find the closest community dispute resolution center.  Future webinars will cover limited-scope representation, e-filing, and other legal topics covered by Michigan Legal Help.

All of us at the Michigan Legal Help Program are grateful that Bridgeport Consulting was able to provide insight into how we can improve our self-help center network and we look forward to putting those perceptive recommendations to work.  To learn more about starting a MLH self-help center in your area, contact Ramzi Badwi at 734-714-3243 or rbadwi@mplp.org.