Michigan Legal Help: Program is not so helpful in Muskegon County - yet

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– LEGAL NEWS PHOTOS BY DIANA L. COLEMAN


By Diana L. Coleman
Legal News

On July 1, 2013, Muskegon County established a Michigan Legal Help center on the sixth floor in the jury assembly room/law library. The area consists of two computer terminals and a printer.

The original computer program is the result of a statewide collaboration of judges, courts, lawyers, bar associations, non-profit legal aid agencies, legal self-help centers, libraries and many others.

Michigan Legal Help.org is managed by staff at the Michigan Poverty Law Program, a joint effort of Legal Services of South Central Michigan and the University of Michigan Law School that provides support services to legal aid programs and other poverty law advocates in Michigan.

Michigan Legal Help.org is meant to be an innovative user-friendly legal self-help website and is affiliated with local Michigan Legal Help Self-Help Centers. It is to help educate members of the public about their rights and responsibilities under the law.  The site is supposed to teach website visitors how to navigate the court system when they must handle a legal problem without a
lawyer. It will also guide users to local resources such as lawyers, self-help centers, and community organizations.

The site contains legal information, not legal advice.  It is not a substitute for hiring a lawyer. You must have basic computer skills to navigate the system. You can use a smart phone, tablet or
other mobile device, but not all features may work on them.

When logging on to the site, the first screen will give you a list of self-help tools and a list of organizations and courts.  Categories listed under the self-help tools are Family, Protection from Abuse, Housing, Consumer, Expungement, and Public Benefits.  The categories under the Organizations and Courts are Find a Lawyer, Self-Help Centers, Community Services, and Court Information. There is also a video on this page that the user can watch to learn about the website.

I decided to take the site for a test run to see how user-friendly it really is.  Logging on and getting to the family law section was easy, but then I decided to select a form, complete it and print it.  Selecting “Petition for Name Change,” I opened the family law section and looked through various selections.  None were relevant to a name change.  I continued to search for the form by toggling through various parts of the section.  The program does get a thumbs-up for the Q&A section about divorce, custody, child support, time frames, service of process, and completing divorce forms with or without minor children. The Q&A sections of the other categories were also helpful and easy to understand. However, nowhere to be located was the “Petition for Name Change” form.

There was not anyone in the room to assist me, so I went on the Muskegon County Probate Court website, clicked on SCAO forms, and located the “Petition for Name Change.”  After I completed the form on-line with rather bogus information, it was time to print.

The first problem was that the printer that was between the two terminals earlier in July was no longer there—but I proceeded to hit “print.”  Circuit Court Records staff had advised that the cost of printing is 25 cents per page and the computer would request that the desired number of quarters be inserted in the printer before it would deliver the desired forms.  I was also advised that I would be given an option to establish a Michigan Legal Help.org account so that if I wanted to access these forms at a later time, they would be saved under the personal account. 

The option to establish an account did not appear on screen nor did a request for money for the two page form I had requested for printing.  It just printed — maybe, or maybe not, somewhere in the ozone.

There was a nice young man that came in the room during the process and explained to me that he was an intern and offered to help.  Thomas Scott is a criminal justice student at Ferris State University via Muskegon Community College, and was asked to come to the sixth floor to offer assistance if needed. He was very pleasant and tried to find the printer that was supposed to be attached to the terminals. He said the county is in the process of installing a third terminal where the printer used to sit because the program had been so well-received and busy.  We never did find the pay-as-you-go printer.

In all fairness, the county is working out the glitches and hopes to have the system working more smoothly soon. Staff in the Circuit Court Records office stated that the divorce forms through the self-help website are working quite well, but they have experienced a rather significant amount of problems with the PPO portion of the website. Many Michigan courts have installed a self-help center, but in most cases the center is either staffed by a court employee or, in many cases, by a law school student.  The county is working with Thomas M. Cooley Law School at this time to try and establish an arrangement that would have Cooley students assisting residents in their searches, saving, and printing.

With the proper instruction on site to help users find the necessary information, the center should be an asset. Sandra VanderHyde in the Circuit Court Administrator’s office has oversight of this program and is working to see that the self-help center is both functional and a benefit to the residents of the county. VanderHyde had not returned phone calls at press time to give some insight regarding the time line for the center to be a useful tool. Hopefully, it will be soon.

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