Helping families get the legal information they need

When people want legal information but do not have access to a lawyer, they tend to head for the internet. Sometimes, they find what they’re looking for. But often, they end up overwhelmed: a search for “special education Pennsylvania,” for example, turns up 345 million sites, each of which, when visited, leads to more clicks and links.

The fact that there is so much information online, much of it disorganized and only some of it likely to be relevant to any particular visitor’s concerns, creates a huge challenge for legal aid organizations. Their web and social media sites must be readily findable by the people they seek to serve, and and must stand out from commercial and other sites that may be designed for different purposes. Navigation must be simple and straightforward. Content must be accurate, but also conveyed in terms understandable to people without legal training — often a difficult balance to achieve. Further, people seeking legal information are often in stressful situations, which complicates communication; and many speak languages other than English.

This semester, a team from the Sheller Center’s Access to Justice Clinic took an in-depth look at the web site of the Education Law Center-PA and produced a report on ways in which its already well-developed site could better serve families. Recommendations included reorganizing the site to enable parents to jump more quickly to the information they need; simplifying menus and lists; adding natural-language search and translation functions; developing more short, “plain language” resource materials; and more.

Here’s how the team, which consisted of Ingrid Xiomara Lopez Martinez, Austin Kurtanich, and Lydia Anderson, all 2Ls, summarized their work:

The Education Law Center (ELC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving access to quality public education for all children in Pennsylvania, particularly those who are underserved. ELC provides a wide range of resources and services to various stakeholders, including families, school officials, policymakers, and community organizations. The purpose of our project was to analyze the ELC website, including its strengths and weaknesses, as well as to provide suggestions for improvement.

Our report focused on making recommendations to ELC’s overall website organization, design, and structure, including specific priority areas, such as Special Education, Bullying and Harassment, and Exclusionary Discipline. Through meetings with an ELC attorney, we learned that these priority areas were ELC’s most sought-after materials. While most parents use ELC’s Hotline number to inquire about issues, it is important that ELC’s website provides parents and other users with accessible information needed to assist in advocating for students and promoting equal opportunities to learn.

This project is a second installment in the Clinic’s work on making legal web sites more accessible to the public. Last year, a team developed a set of recommendations to enhance the web site of Philadelphia’s Common Pleas and Municipal Courts. While the context was different, the basic thrust of both efforts was the same: online legal materials are most useful to the public when they are easy to find, directly responsive to users’ actual needs, and presented in simple, easily understandable formats and language.

Self-help centers in PA courts benefit litigants, judges, and court staff

In an effort to help unrepresented people navigate complex procedures, six PA judicial systems — like many others around the country — have introduced court-based “self-help centers.” In “Justice for All: The Current Success of Self-Help Centers in Pennsylvania Courts and Recommendations for Growth,” a Sheller Center team offers their findings from a semester-long study of how these centers work and the results they’ve achieved.

The report discusses the design and funding of self-help centers; provides reactions to the centers from judges, court staff and litigants; and offers contacts and suggestions for courts and advocates interested in creating or expanding help centers in their locations. The report was authored by Catherine Baldwin, Tess Frydman, and Cathy Ginder, 2L students in the Sheller Center’s Access to Justice Clinic.

Some thoughts from Catherine Baldwin:

Court self-help centers, on their face, seem like an easy win. We allow individuals to represent themselves pro se and those self-represented litigants make up a huge portion of the parties in civil cases. The legal process can be complex and confusing. Litigants often struggle with the procedural aspects of their cases: what it means to serve their opponent, which forms to use, and what to expect in the courtroom. A court self-help center can provide these resources and set self-represented litigants on the track to fully participate in their case. A prepared litigant improves judicial efficiency because cases are not gummed up by procedural problems.

Why then are there so few court self-help centers in Pennsylvania? One of the major obstacles is a concern about courts providing legal advice to litigants. Personnel who are not attorneys may not offer legal advice, because that would be the unauthorized practice of law. And personnel who are attorneys may not offer legal advice because doing so would make the court seem partial to the one receiving the advice. Courts are concerned that help centers might not be able to offer neutral legal information without crossing the line into legal advice.

However daunting this obstacle may seem to courts, it is surmountable. There can be a clear distinction between legal information and legal advice. Take Colorado as an example: it has a self-help center system that spans the entire state. At its inception, the Supreme Court met the concern about legal advice head on. In a directive released in 2013, the Chief Justice set forth a standard. Colorado self-help personnel may provide information about court procedures, offer educational materials, assist in the selection of forms, answer general questions about the court process, as well as many other services. Among other things, personnel may not represent litigants, give an opinion on the outcome of a case, provide legal analysis, or make a recommendation whether the case should be brought to court. Self-help personnel may not say anything they would not repeat in the presence of the opposing party in the case.

Our report on court help centers in Pennsylvania and other states outlines various structures for court help centers, addresses common issues, and provides contact information for a network of professionals who are willing to lend their expertise to courts interested in creating help centers.

For most litigants, courthouses are at best, overwhelming and intimidating. Self-represented litigants are so often left to fend for themselves, adrift in the legalese and formality that comes with every civil case. Court help centers, whatever their structure, prepare litigants to participate fully in their case and make the court less frightening.

Students discuss their work on “Six Practical Ways Courts Can Reduce Default Judgments”

– by Adam Karbeling and Jessie Hemmons

Adam Karbeling and Jessie Hemmons, 2L students in the Center’s Access to Justice Clinic, authored “Six Practical Ways Courts Can Reduce Default Judgments in Debt Collection Cases,” described in more detail in a separate post. Here, Adam and Jessie comment on their experience in developing the report.

Consumer debt defendants are subjected to default judgments when they miss their hearings. When this happens, debt plaintiffs win without needing to prove their cases on the merits, and defendants lose without being heard. We looked at the reasons why debt defendants commonly miss their hearings, and found that it is often due to non-negligent factors such as improper service, confusion from complicated forms and processes, and being misled by the other party.

It is clear that courts should seek to reduce the high rate of default judgments as a matter of justice. Our report aims to assist with such efforts by listing and describing six initiatives that would help courts address the issue. Our solutions would promote increased hearing attendance and procedural fairness. The aim of our report is to move the conversation toward the actual implementation of these ideas, so we chose feasible and effective initiatives that have been tested in other jurisdictions.

Jessie added some reflections connected to her work before coming to law school:

Coming from a background in behavioral economics, where my work was focused on convincing physicians to make changes to their longstanding clinical practices, I adapted this strategy to support my legal advocacy in the Access to Justice Clinic. In my prior profession, I had learned that promoting change through written materials is effective when: a) the information is communicated concisely; b) questions are answered preemptively; c) and instructions for implementation are provided. Brain science has shown that taking in new information while working in a very high paced environment, filled with packed schedules and information overload is – simply – difficult. Thus, creating effective advocacy materials for professionals in an overloaded informational space has become a bit of an art form, incorporating lessons learned from neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science while also respecting the intellectual capacity of the reader.

Keeping this in mind, my partner and I incorporated these learnings to create an advocacy piece aimed at reducing default judgments in consumer court cases in Philadelphia. We drilled the report down to the bones to decide our main objective: getting the court to implement strategies to reduce default judgments in consumer debt cases. We then faced a choice: take a holistic approach and focus on systemic change or promote tangible strategies to mitigate issues quickly to help defendants in real time.

We chose the latter, as this course is relatively short in duration, and the problems are affecting people every single day. We wanted to focus on solutions that could be implemented with near immediacy. So, we focused on a few techniques employed in other jurisdictions that could be relatively easy to implement and support a reduction in default judgments (due to failure to appear) quickly. We made sure to include examples of how these strategies have been deployed by other jurisdictions to assuage any fears that “it just can’t be done.” While our report focuses on solutions that do not resolve the underlying causes of due process issues related to default judgments in consumer debt cases, we hope we have contributed to this space by providing easy-to-implement solutions to work as a bridge while the systemic issues get addressed.


New report identifies practical steps courts can take to reduce default judgments in debt cases

Text message reminders, comprehensible notices, expanded hearing options, a “compliance checklist”: these are among the recommendations in the Center’s latest report on how to reduce the staggering number of default judgments in debt-collection cases.

About half of all cases brought by third-party debt collectors in Philadelphia Municipal Court result in default judgments, in which the Court awards the full amount requested by the creditor without hearing the alleged debtor’s side of the story. These judgments further impoverish Philadelphians who may already be at the lower end of the income ladder.

“Six Practical Ways Courts Can Reduce Default Judgments in Debt Collection Cases,” authored by students Adam Karbeling and Jessie Hemmons, discusses why defendants may not appear for their hearings, and finds that — contrary to conventional wisdom — those reasons often have nothing to do with carelessness or a lack of interest in being heard. Drawing on experience from jurisdictions around the country, Adam and Jessie discuss six relatively easy steps that courts can take to make the entry of default judgments less likely.

In a separate post, Adam and Jessie discuss their experience putting together the report.

Could “qualified legal advocates” help Pennsylvanians with their legal issues?

Vast numbers of Americans, including a sizeable share of the population of Pennsylvania, have no access to legal help in important matters involving basic needs, such as housing, child support and custody, and public benefits. And while efforts are (always) being made to expand rights to counsel and pro bono services, it is widely agreed that, at least in the foreseeable future, there will not be enough lawyers to meet everyone’s needs at prices they can afford.

It’s also unclear, however, that everyone who confronts a legal issue requires the services of a lawyer who has been trained in all of the areas addressed in law school and on the bar examination. That’s why one effective response to the “justice gap,” according to Briana Ziff, a student in the Sheller Center’s Access to Justice Clinic, may be to authorize trained individuals other than lawyers to provide legal assistance in specific situations, such as certain types of family-law and landlord-tenant proceedings.

In an article published in this month’s Philadelphia Lawyer, Ms. Ziff presents her research on four states — Utah, Arizona, Minnesota and Delaware — that have taken steps to do just that. “Qualified legal advocates” is Delaware’s term; while the states use different terminology and take slightly different approaches, the underlying idea — that effective legal help of certain kinds can be provided by people with varying levels of skill and training, and that not all of them have to be lawyers — is the same.

So far, according to the article, the results are encouraging: access to help has grown and the quality of services appears to be good. Given the scale of Pennsylvania’s “justice gap,” Ms. Ziff argues, it’s time to consider whether qualified legal advocates could provide a valuable service to Pennsylvanians as well.

Navigators could help pro se defendants in debt-collection court

By Nicole Kerr and Ed DeLuca

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the current access-to-justice crisis in debt collection court. That is why the Access to Justice Clinic has prioritized the development of alternative reform proposals to aid the Philadelphia Municipal Court in its commitment to 100% access to justice.

This semester, the Debt Collection team — Ed DeLuca, Scott Hofman, Nicole Kerr, and Rory Kress Mandel — explored emerging models for non-lawyer assistance.  Identifying court navigator programs as effective means for remedying unmet civil needs, our team developed a proposal for the implementation of a pilot Consumer Debt Court Navigator program in Municipal Court.

To inform our proposal, we interviewed leaders of existing court navigator programs in courts across the country. Additionally, to ensure the efficacy of implementing such a program in Philadelphia Municipal Court, we conducted over ten hours of court observation. 

Based on leader recommendations and our observation of high default rates in debt collection cases, we proposed a proactive outreach model that would educate debt collection defendants about their legal rights. Trained navigators, equipped with contact information available from court records, would be tasked with contacting defendants before their hearings. Both by mail and over the phone, navigators would provide defendants with procedural and legal information, make referrals for legal assistance, and answer general questions. By highlighting the legal ramifications of failing to appear in court, the navigators would emphasize that defendants should appear on their court date. Navigators would also be on site to assist defendants on the day of their hearing.

Defendants who are equipped with knowledge about their legal rights and court processes will be able to make meaningful and informed decisions about their cases — the first of which, we hope, will be to appear at their hearings.

A user-friendly court web site for Philadelphia

Students in the Access to Justice Clinic spent some time this year studying the web site of the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas and Municipal Court (collectively, the First Judicial District, or FJD). Because our focus is on getting more legal information and help to people who need it, we explored the site from the perspective of the public rather than that of legal professionals. We were especially interested in whether unrepresented folks and those who help them (friends, family, community partners) would find the site helpful.

Students summarized their observations in a set of slides, Redesign of the FJD Website, as well as a more detailed report. And, in a cross-campus collaboration, students of Prof. Bryan Satalino (Tyler School of Art and Architecture) came up with visual design ideas for the site.

As all the students quickly recognized, unrepresented people who visit a court web site are typically looking for a concrete answer – for example, how to respond to (or file) a landlord-tenant or small-claims complaint, how to modify a child support or custody order, how to deal with a debt-collection case, or how to obtain a court record. But many sites do not lead with answers to these sorts of questions. Instead, they “welcome” visitors with complex descriptions of court structures and processes, lists of administrative orders, compilations of oddly-named forms and rules, and other material that may not seem relevant — and may be overwhelming and even scary.

To its credit, the First Judicial District is taking a different approach. Just last week, Municipal Court unveiled reorganized pages designed to take people quickly to the information they need, and to communicate information in friendlier, more understandable language. (Check out the new landlord-tenant case page for an example.)  Common Pleas Court has made significant improvements on its pages as well, with more to come.

Providing user-friendly information on court web sites is just a step toward narrowing the “justice gap,” but it’s an important step. We applaud the FJD for its efforts, and we appreciate its openness to hearing community voices, including those of our students.

Relieving the legal burdens on unrepresented defendants in debt-collection cases

  • By Javier Zurita, Luke Myers, and Elizabeth Napierkowski,

This pandemic revealed the extent of economic inequities in our society. However, defendants sued in Philadelphia Municipal Court over allegedly unpaid debt have long struggled with an additional hindrance – the issuance of default judgments based on inadequate proof that the money sought is actually owed. Our investigation and report focused on the tens of thousands of consumer-debt actions brought by collection agencies – generally out-of-state debt buyers — each year, against low-income Philadelphians. Most of these defendants do not have legal representation.

Based on our courtroom observations, court dockets, and legal research, we created a checklist intended to help the Philadelphia Municipal Court ensure that in consumer-debt claims brought by collection agencies, default judgments are awarded only when claims have merit. Our proposed checklist itemizes the evidence that the Court should require from plaintiffs before they enter judgment (for example, proof that the plaintiff actually owns the debt; proof of the terms of the contract; and proof of the amount of damages sought). The proposal draws on local and state rules and case law, especially Local Rule 120, which states that Pennsylvania Rules of Evidence apply not only at trials but also before a default judgment can be entered. It is our hope that the Court will utilize the proposed checklist to provide greater due process to defendants in debt cases.

Helping unrepresented litigants navigate online Family Court

– Puja Upadhyay

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Family Court in Philadelphia transitioned to online in mid-2020 and has largely remained online since then. The group arguably most affected by the transition to online was unrepresented people, who constitute the majority of Family Court litigants.

Even before the pandemic, the process for bringing a case in Family Court was complex, but the complexity was intensified with the transition to online. While there were some benefits to the new format, there were also new barriers to successful participation, including having an adequate internet connection, a quiet space without distractions, the required technology, and so on.

However, some Family Court judges have indicated their interest in holding hearings online for some matters even after there is no longer a health risk. Given the new virtual environment, our work as part of the Access to Justice Clinic this semester was to better understand, and find ways to improve, the online Family Court experience for unrepresented litigants.

Most of our work this semester focused on gathering information about the shift to online – specifically, the biggest challenges unrepresented litigants (and practitioners) were facing, and the solutions that they hoped to see in response. Esteban Rodriguez, Ross Wiech and I felt it was important to gather a range of perspectives, and to do so with enough depth that we would be able to gain meaningful insights for our work. To that end, we relied primarily on one-on-one interviews with family law attorneys, Temple Law students participating in family law clinic, and of course, unrepresented litigants themselves. To get the fullest picture of navigating Family Court online, we also observed several Family Court hearings to see first-hand how unrepresented litigants were faring.

We also took stock of the guidance that is already available online for unrepresented litigants. For instance, Philadelphia Legal Assistance (PLA) has several webpages about navigating online Family Court and explaining the relevant law. The Philadelphia Bar Association also developed several in-depth brochures on navigating each type of matter in Family Court during COVID-19. There were also many general resources about how to prepare for a court hearing online.

However, based on our interviews and court observations, we identified a gap in the resources that were available to pro se litigants. While there is a lot of useful information available, it is spread across multiple different websites and formats. Additionally, there is relatively little guidance about participating in an online Family Court hearing, specifically in Philadelphia. Our conversations revealed that there were several tips and tricks for navigating Family Court in Philadelphia that were well known to people familiar with the system, but that were not clearly articulated in public resources.

Our goal became to create resources that would give pro se litigants a sense of what to expect at online Family Court hearings in Philadelphia. Unrepresented litigants are already juggling multiple responsibilities. Without a grasp on what to expect at an online Family Court hearing on a very basic level, they are already one step behind.  Focusing on practical guidance rather than legal arguments, we consolidated the advice from our conversations, observations, and the various resources spread across multiple channels, into two “portable” PDF flyers that could easily be attached to an email or even used as a physical handout. Additionally, to dispel any confusion over what it looks like to participate in an online hearing, we created two short explainer videos that demonstrate what it looks like to join a Family Court hearing on the Court’s chosen video conferencing platform, RingCentral.

We hope that these resources will help to level the playing field for unrepresented litigants. While the transition to online has improved access to justice in some ways, it has also severely limited it in others. With luck, our contribution will help unrepresented litigants feel at least somewhat more confident when they click into their Family Court hearing link.

 

Observations from a semester’s work on the SSI Project in the Access to Justice Clinic

-Stephanie Curl, Lauren Williams and Josh Lachewitz

This semester, we set out to create user-friendly materials to assist recipients of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) – a federal safety-net program that provides essential monthly benefits to people who are 65 and older, blind, or disabled and who are very low income. SSI is not the same as Social Security, for which many SSI beneficiaries don’t qualify. To be eligible for SSI, a person must have access to very little money (carefully calculated using many factors that look at assets and income) and have a documented and ongoing disability that makes it difficult or impossible to work.

Our project focused on two aspects of SSI. First, we addressed the situation in which the Social Security Administration (SSA) tells recipients that their benefits will be cut because they have too much money. Second, we addressed overpayments, which happen when SSA informs recipients that SSA paid them too much and now the recipient must pay SSA back. Focusing on these two areas — both of them sources of great stress and confusion to SSI recipients — allowed us to narrow the scope of a very complex topic.

Sara Lynch, a staff attorney at Community Legal Services (CLS), had brought the idea for this project to the Access to Justice Clinic after seeing clients who were confused and scared about what to do if their benefits were cut or they were told they owed SSA money. We began our project with research—wading through as much material as we could find on SSI—and quickly found out that SSI is incredibly complex. We then took questions and concerns to several local attorneys and community advocates who specialize in assisting clients through the SSI process. From those meetings, we were able to narrow down our project to the two areas described above; however, we also realized that there are many more aspects of SSI that students could focus on for future projects.

Steph spoke to a CLS client who had been denied SSI several times. The client expressed frustration at the long wait times that are characteristic of the appeals process. Ultimately, her first appeal resulted in a denial after a year of waiting for a response. The client said that she felt like her application was being sent off into a black hole and no one wanted to help her until she came to CLS.

After talking with the CLS client, our goal became to create materials that were not only user-friendly but that empowered people as they advocated for themselves. Our first pass resembled the information that was already available on the Social Security website—a bit academic, not conversational and a little too dense. We incorporated the feedback we received, and learned that our materials would be best presented as part of a family of materials CLS provides for clients, all with the same look and feel. CLS provided a template to us and we were able to drop our copy directly into it. We had been playing around all semester with graphics in Microsoft Word, but it turned out we didn’t have to be quite so creative.

We ended up creating a flyer informing SSI recipients about how to stay on SSI, which addresses what to do if recipients find that their benefits have been cut or reduced, and importantly, how to keep it from happening again. We also created a flyer on what recipients can do when SSA tells them they have been overpaid.

Throughout the project, we collaborated with Dacil Keo, a paralegal at CLS who works with clients, often when they have had their benefits cut off or reduced. She told us that many members of the Asian-American community in Philadelphia are affected, and our materials might be even more useful if translated into some of their native languages. Dacil also invited us to sit in on a meeting of the Asian Pacific American Social Services Providers Group, composed of individuals representing organizations that assist Asian Americans in Philadelphia. Through that discussion, we learned that the most useful languages for translation of our materials were likely Chinese, Cambodian and Vietnamese. But we are also left with the feeling that there is so much more to do! Immigration status affects SSI—what about a resource for that? Many community organizations work with people eligible for SSI—what about creating a resource for advocates to use when their work coincides with an application or an appeal related to SSI? What about the homeless population, for whom our suggestions about keeping receipts and documentation in a shoebox or a folder were particularly poorly suited? What could we do for them?

Though we learned a lot this semester and hopefully created some useful resources for CLS, we are hopeful and enthusiastic that other students may continue this work in coming semesters.