February 26, 2009 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Navigating the legal system can be difficult, especially if you don’t have a lawyer.
Unfortunately, legal-aid organizations are able to represent only a relatively small percentage of the people who qualify for assistance. The most recent study by the Illinois Bar Association put the figure in that state at 16 percent. Everyone else is on his or her own.
To make it easier for people to represent themselves in court, a growing number of legal organizations are creating online tools that automate the process of preparing legal filings. The computerized interviews — which work like Turbo Tax does in preparing taxes — ask people a series of questions about their legal issue, and then use the answers to produce the forms and documents that they need to file with the court.
“We’re the first ones to say, If you can get a lawyer, you should,” says Lisa Colpoys, executive director of Illinois Legal Aid Online, in Chicago, which has created 54 automated documents for lay people. “We’re not promoting that people represent themselves, but if they have to, we want to give them the resources they need so that they can do it better.”
Some of the automated documents that Illinois Legal Aid Online has created are very simple, she says, like the one that produces a letter asking creditors to stop contacting the sender. Others are much more complicated. Depending on the answers someone gives in response to questions related to an uncontested divorce, the tool could generate as many as 25 documents.
Other automated documents help people seek a restraining order, request changes to their child support or custody agreements, try to get their security deposit back, or deal with other civil legal issues.
For the last two years, Illinois Legal Aid Online has been working with the state court system to set up legal self-help centers — computer labs where people can get information about how to deal with their legal problems — across the state. Ms. Colpoys says that the organization’s ability to automate the preparation of legal documents was critical in persuading the courts to join the effort.
“When people are using the automated documents, the judges receive legible, complete, and accurate court forms and documents,” she says, “so that makes them happy.”
110,000 Documents
So far, legal self-help centers have opened in 21 of the state’s 101 counties, with 10 more scheduled to open by September. Usually they are located inside the courthouse, but in some of the most rural areas, they are located in libraries. Staff members and volunteers are available to help people make their way through the automated documents.
“One of the exciting things about the document-assembly initiative is that it’s brought the folks within the courts who care about access together with the legal-aid folks who are trying to figure out how do we provide services beyond the capacity that we have right now,” says Mark H. O’Brien, executive director of Pro Bono Net, in New York.
Pro Bono Net, an organization founded a decade ago to put information technology to use at legal-aid groups, provides training and other assistance to help organizations develop automated documents. It also manages the technology system that acts as a clearinghouse for the tools that legal-aid groups across the country create.
In 2008, more than 110,000 legal documents were prepared using the tools housed on Pro Bono Net’s server, a 46-percent increase over the number prepared in 2007.
The centralized technology system doesn’t just save state legal-aid groups the time and money it would take to maintain their own servers for the documents, says Mr. O’Brien. It also allows them to learn from what groups have already done and, in some cases, modify existing documents for use in their state.
“Say I’m working on content for Montana, and I want to create a power of attorney,” says Kate Bladow, coordinator of the National Public Automated Documents Online project at Pro Bono Net. “I can see what everyone else has done, pull out the parts that apply to me, and replicate their work, which saves time.”
Like similar organizations in many other states, Illinois Legal Aid Online has also used the system to create automated documents designed for use by legal-aid lawyers.
Last month, the Illinois organization and Pro Bono Net started work on a project that would link the document-preparation tools and the databases that legal-aid lawyers use to record client information, case notes, documents, and other material.
Says Ms. Colpoys: “It will pull information from their case-management system and automatically dump it into the automated documents interview that they select, probably saving them a lot of time and giving them more time to actually lawyer.”
For more information: Go to http://www. illinoislegalaid.org or http://www.probono.net.
Innovations is a column that focuses on pioneering efforts by nonprofit organizations to solve social problems. If you have an idea we should consider for the column, send it to editor@philanthropy.com
