The Michigan Legal Help Program (MLHP) has enjoyed a great relationship with Michigan courts for some time. Many self-represented litigants need assistance that court staff are not able to provide, so a referral to MichiganLegalHelp.org makes perfect sense. That being said, MichiganLegalHelp.org is not ideal for every legal issue, nor for every scenario possible within a particular legal issue. We’d like to share some information about what services the website provides, what types of content the website covers, and who may be a good candidate for handling their legal problems with MichiganLegalHelp.org.
What Services Does Michigan Legal Help Provide?
Services provided on MichiganLegalHelp.org typically fall into two groups: (1) legal information and resources designed to help visitors handle their legal issue on their own; and (2) tools visitors can use to receive a referral to get assistance from another organization.The resources designed to assist pro se litigants are organized into eight main types of content: Articles; Do-It-Yourself tools; Common Questions; Checklists; Definitions; Videos; Flow Charts; and Toolkits. Articles include the most detailed information related to the legal issue. Do-It-Yourself tools help the visitor generate the forms they need for their legal process. The vast majority of these forms are State Court Administrative Office-approved. Checklists guide the visitor through the legal procedure they are interested in, step-by-step, and in some cases are specific to their county’s procedures. Common Questions are short answers to frequently asked questions about the related legal topic.
Definitions are words or phrases on the website, usually legal terms, that appear underlined and when clicked reveal a custom definition. Michigan Legal Help videos explain common and complex topics covered elsewhere on the website, but are valuable for people who prefer to learn by watching videos rather than by reading. These videos explain how to serve divorce or custody papers, how to apply for a personal protection order, and more.
Flow charts are used to explain the possible steps and different outcomes within a complex process like divorce or a Child Protective Services investigation. A toolkit, the final content type, is a bundle containing the other pieces of content related to its subject. For example, the “I Need a Divorce and I Have Children” toolkit contains several articles addressing the finer details of the divorce process; the Do-It-Yourself Divorce tool used to generate the necessary forms for a divorce; Common Questions about Divorce with Children; the associated divorce Checklists; and other related pieces of content. For this reason, we think of toolkits as a great starting point for our visitors.
The legal information provided on our website can be very helpful to visitors handling their problem without a lawyer; however, this isn’t the only resource offered on MichiganLegalHelp.org. Additional services include our referral based tools—the LiveHelp chat service and the Guide to Legal Help—as well as referral features on the website that allow visitors to learn more about courts, agencies, and useful organizations located in their area.
The LiveHelp chat service is an instant messaging service that connects a visitor with a real person who can help them find relevant Michigan Legal Help content, answer simple questions involving legal information, and provide trusted external links not given on the website. This service is offered from Monday to Friday, 11 am to 3 pm. Outside of these hours, visitors can use the same function to send an e-mail to the Michigan Legal Help Program. E-mails are typically answered within 48 hours.
The Guide to Legal Help is a legal triage tool that asks visitors several questions about their legal issue, household income, whether they belong to particular demographic groups, and more. After answering these questions, the Guide to Legal Help directs the visitor to content on MichiganLegalHelp.org that may be helpful and refers them to Find a Lawyer resources such as legal aid offices and private bar services, including Modest Means and Limited Scope services. If the visitor may be eligible for legal aid, they will receive a legal aid contact link. The Guide to Legal Help takes an average of less than two minutes to complete and is a very useful tool in many cases. All web pages also refer visitors to the closest Self-Help Center (brick-and-mortar location with free access to computers, a printer, and high-speed Internet), court/agency they might need, or community service organization.
Which Subjects Does Michigan Legal Help Cover?
Our content on MichiganLegalHelp.org is currently divided into 14 categories, each with several subcategories. These categories are Family; Personal Safety; Housing; Money and Debt; Public Assistance; Income Tax; Crime, Traffic, and ID; Employment; End-of-Life Planning; Education; Immigration; Farmworkers; Going to Court; and E-filing.The MichiganLegalHelp.org homepage features a “Self Help Tools” section that lists all of these categories, along with several of the subcategories. Users can also navigate to these lists through the “Self-Help Tools” menu at the top of every page. Some of our most popular toolkits include “I Need a Divorce and I Do Not Have Minor Children,” “I Need a Divorce and I Have Children,” “I Need a Custody Order, Emancipation - Becoming an Adult Before Age 18,” and “Getting a Michigan Driver’s License.” For a complete list of the Do-It-Yourself tools available, scroll down to the very bottom of the website and click the orange “All Forms” link. In addition to this, an e-mail listserv is available to receive a monthly update of our List of Toolkits and Interviews document. A survey will be coming soon to allow visitors to request that they be added to this listserv. Look for a link to this survey at the bottom of the website, near the “All Forms” link.
Why We Can’t Help Everyone
The Michigan Legal Help website is designed to provide free legal information for people handling civil law issues on their own in Michigan. This means that the first group of residents we cannot help are those with criminal issues. That being said, if a visitor is requesting criminal law information through our LiveHelp instant-messaging service, we do not simply turn them away. We will let them know that they can contact pretrial services of the court their case is in to ask how to request a public defender. They can also use our Guide to Legal Help to receive contact information for a lawyer referral service, just as visitors with civil law issues can do. It is also worth noting that setting aside a conviction (expungement) is a subject that falls under civil law and is covered on MichiganLegalHelp.org.The Michigan Legal Help Program is a relatively small team. We have four staff attorneys who create all of the content you will find on the website. These attorneys are also responsible for reviewing published content for legal accuracy and editing it to reflect any changes that may have been made to Michigan law. This means that choosing the next topic to be covered on the website must be a careful process.
When deciding which new topics to cover, a primary consideration is whether it will be in high demand from Michigan Legal Help’s target audience. We see this audience as consisting of low- to middle-
Finally, while we strive to provide accessible legal information by writing at a 6th-grade reading level and doing testing to ensure the website is user-friendly, there are some people who will not understand the information or won’t read it thoroughly or carefully. We try to address that by providing information in a variety of formats, but you still may encounter people who struggle to handle legal problems that we cover on the website.
Content on the Horizon
Several topics are scheduled to be added to the website in the near future. One of these is a Minor Guardianship toolkit covering petitioning for a guardianship, guardianship reviews, and terminating a guardianship. The toolkit will also contain a Do-It-Yourself tool that will generate several relevant forms. Michigan Legal Help attorneys are also developing a toolkit detailing the subject of applying for Medicaid and Medicaid eligibility.There are additional pieces of content in development that add new information to a currently existing toolkit. Some of this new content includes topics like negotiations in eviction cases, setting aside a consent judgment in an eviction case, rent to own housing, Social Security Disability Insurance, Social Security retirement, and the appeals process for Social Security programs.
Another toolkit that will be coming to the website soon is the “I Need an Advance Directive or Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care” toolkit. This toolkit will include articles covering a durable power of attorney for health care, revoking or changing a durable power of attorney, advanced directives, the topic of elder abuse, and a do-it-yourself tool that will help a visitor generate a durable power of attorney for health care.
The Michigan Legal Help Program would like to continue to foster a mutually beneficial relationship with the Michigan courts and encourages court staff to refer anyone they see fit to MichiganLegalHelp.org. If it is unclear whether a visitor’s legal issue is covered on our website, court staff can recommend that the visitor find the category their legal issue is contained within on the main page and search for the content they need from there. The visitor can also complete the Guide to Legal Help to find their legal issue or a lawyer, or use the LiveHelp chat service to get personalized help.
As always, the staff of the Michigan Legal Help Program will keep their eyes out for the most in-demand legal issues to feature on the website and hopes to continually increase the scope and effectiveness of MichiganLegalHelp.org. If you have ideas for content that we should prioritize, please drop us a line using the “Contact Us” link at the bottom of the website.