Daily Briefs

Michigan Legal Help reaches milestone


Michigan Legal Help (MLH) is five years old this month. Despite its youth, MLH is recognized throughout the state as a reliable source for free, accurate, up-to-date tools and referrals for civil legal problems. It is also a model for programs developing similar resources across the country.

In addition to its fifth birthday, this month MLH is also celebrating the Michigan State Bar Foundation’s announcement that MLH Director Angela Tripp is a 2017 recipient of the Access to Justice Award, which honors persons who have significantly advanced access to justice for the poor in Michigan.

The most important component of MLH is the legal information it provides for people with legal problems. New content is always being added to the website, often in response to the requests of visitors. In the last year, MLH has added information about special education, how to make a will, unemployment benefits, and farmworkers’ rights, among others.

MLH works hard to keep everything on the site up to date, which means staying on top of all changes to laws and practices in Michigan. MLH continues to close in on the goal of translating all of its content into Spanish for publication on its Spanish-language website, AyudaLegaldeMichigan.org.

In its first five years, the Michigan Legal Help website had 11.6 million page views and 3.87 million visitors. In July 2017, there were about 29,000 visits per week.  Traffic to the website increased by 20 percent in MLH’s fifth year.  On MLH, visitors can complete the court forms they need in order to resolve their legal problems.  In 2016 MLH visitors completed 86,824 sets of forms. This is an average of 238 sets of forms completed each day, and represents a 38 percent increase from 2015.

Another way that MLH helps people is through LiveHelp, an interactive, chat-based form of assisting website users without giving legal advice. LiveHelp agents, who are trained law student volunteers, interact with website visitors, helping them navigate the website and answering questions that do not require legal advice. In 2016 agents helped 7,775 people, an increase of 119 percent since 2015.

Michigan Legal Help has developed and continues to support a network of fifteen Self-Help Centers (SHCs) throughout the state. These are locations where visitors can go to access computers, printers, internet, and legal information (but not advice). 

For each new Self-Help Center, MLH staff conduct an on-site training for personnel from local courts, legal services, libraries, community organizations, and the host location. MLH provides continuing support in the form of quarterly webinars, additional trainings, and news updates. In the last year, MLH opened new SHC sites in Saginaw, Livingston, Alpena, and Grand Traverse counties and is are preparing to open more Centers this year in Jackson, Genesee, and Cass counties.

A critical component of the MLH mission is to build strong partnerships with courts, legal services providers, lawyers, and community organizations to improve access to justice. To this end, MLH staff, and in particular, its director, Angela Tripp, participates in numerous statewide and national committees related to legal services delivery, as well as several SCAO forms committees.

MLH continues to look for ways to increase awareness of its website and SHCs throughout the state.

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