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Fixes

Legal Aid With a Digital Twist

Matthew Stubenberg was a law student at the University of Maryland in 2010 when he spent part of a day doing expungements. It was a standard law school clinic where students learn by helping clients — in this case, he helped them to fill out and file petitions to erase parts of their criminal records. (Last week I wrote about the lifelong effects of these records, even if there is no conviction, and the expungement process that makes them go away.)

Although Maryland has a public database called Case Search, using that data to fill out the forms was tedious. “We spent all this time moving data from Case Search onto our forms,” Stubenberg said. “We spent maybe 30 seconds on the legal piece. Why could this not be easier? This was a problem that could be fixed by a computer.”

Stubenberg knew how to code. After law school, he set out to build software that automatically did that tedious work. By September 2014 he had a prototype for MDExpungement, which went live in January 2015. (The website is not pretty — Stubenberg is a programmer, not a designer.)

With MDExpungement, entering a case number brings it up on Case Search. The software then determines whether the case is expungeable. If so, the program automatically transfers the information from Case Search to the expungement form. All that’s left is to print, sign and file it with the court.

In October 2015 a change in Maryland law made more cases eligible for expungement. Between then and March 2016, people filed 7,600 petitions to have their criminal records removed in Baltimore City District Court. More than two-thirds of them came from MDExpungement.

“With the ever-increasing amount of expungements we’re all doing, the app has just made it a lot easier,” said Mary-Denise Davis, a public defender in Baltimore. “I put in a case number and it fills the form out for me. Like magic.”

The rise of online legal forms may not be a gripping subject, but it matters. Tens of millions of Americans need legal help for civil problems — they need a divorce, child support or visitation, protection from abuse or a stay of eviction. They must hold off debt collectors or foreclosure, or get government benefits.

They often have to fight these battles on their own because — despite the fact that civil cases can result in people going to jail, or losing a house, health care or custody of their children — they don’t have the right to a lawyer, as defendants in criminal cases do. Four out of five people who need a civil legal aid lawyer don’t have one.

Walk into a court case between landlords and tenants, or creditors and debtors. The landlord always has a lawyer. The credit card company always has a lawyer. The tenant or debtor practically never does.

This is not just a problem for overmatched individuals. “It creates industries that become more abusive,” said Claudia Johnson, the program manager of LawHelp Interactive, a nationwide initiative to increase access to justice. “They feel ‘we can do whatever we want.’ This is part of the reason we have lost social mobility.”

The solution is to establish a right to counsel in the civil cases where the most is at stake. Many state bar associations support a civil right to counsel, and 18 states are considering laws to guarantee a lawyer in certain civil cases. But until that happens — and we may wait a long time — it makes sense to take a harm-reduction approach and help the self-represented do the best they can. One way is with online forms and apps.

Stubenberg, 28, who is now a lawyer, developed CLUE — Client Legal Utility Engine — at the Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service, a civil legal aid organization where he works.

The lawyers at the service run CLUE on Baltimore citizens who walk through their door or request help via phone or the internet. The program automatically searches for their name in government databases to find other problems requiring legal help, so the lawyer can tackle all of them.

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Claudia Johnson is the program manager of LawHelp Interactive, a nationwide initiative to increase access to justice.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Of about 1,000 clients who have used CLUE so far, a third had expungeable criminal records. Others were in danger of losing their homes because of unpaid water bills of more than $750 — the program flagged them so lawyers could help them get onto a payment plan. Other clients were at risk of foreclosure for other reasons. Others were eligible for government benefits they didn’t know about.

If he can get funding, Stubenberg would like to make the program statewide, and allow other Maryland organizations that work with low-income clients to tap into it — for example, those that work with the homeless.

About 10 years ago, Johnson of LawHelp Interactive was asked to revamp the Oakland legal aid office’s first contact with clients, and she became interested in the challenge of maximizing access to justice through technology. She heard about online forms, which were being used in the Los Angeles courthouse. “I fell completely in love,” she said. “I said this is the thing that’s going to change the way we serve our clients. It has to become ubiquitous.”

The phrase “a passion for online legal forms” might seem incongruous. Not for Johnson. “Sometimes technology is the only thing that can level the playing field,” she said.

Johnson moved to the United States from El Salvador when she was 14. Pro bono legal work runs in her family: Her mother’s family met her father’s family originally when her great-grandfather, a Supreme Court justice in El Salvador, took her great-grandmother’s legal case pro bono and helped her save her land.

She is well on her way to making online legal forms ubiquitous. She took over LawHelp Interactive, which is part of Pro Bono Net, in 2008 when it was in use in 11 states. Now legal services groups in 39 states, Guam, and Ontario, Canada, are using it daily to produce about a half-million legal documents a year. Each group creates documents according to state requirements. LawHelp is the web host and trainer.

Michigan Legal Help is one partner. It has 15 self-help centers across the state. But for those who can’t walk in, the group worked with LawHelp to create a website that takes people step by step through legal processes and completes all necessary forms.

The website was introduced in August 2012, and the next year users filled out 12,000 forms. That number more than quintupled in 2015.

The first thing people do is click on a legal problem: for example, “I Need a Divorce and I Do Not Have Minor Children.” Instead of filling out the legal forms, individuals answer a plain-language questionnaire — for a no-kids divorce, that takes about 20 minutes. The software uses the answers to automatically fill out all the forms. The tool kits and questionnaires also help people with issues that don’t require court — writing letters to a landlord, for instance.

The questionnaire allows individuals to provide the information courts require without having to understand the law, said Angela Tripp, who is co-director of the Michigan Poverty Law Program and program director of Michigan Legal Help. You don’t have to retype your address 15 times for 15 forms. The questionnaire can also screen clients: If you answer “yes” to whether you have misdemeanor convictions on an expungement form, more detailed questions come up. And this method ensures that forms are complete — you can’t print the form unless all the required information is there.

“Before, people filed a lot of forms that didn’t make sense,” said Tripp. “It’s one reason the courts feel so overwhelmed by self-represented litigants. So many of them have been clueless for so long.”

These tools are mainly used by people with no lawyer, but lawyers use them, too. Experienced legal aid attorneys use them to make the process faster and more accurate. And they can be useful for volunteer lawyers who may not have expertise in a particular field. Doing the back-and-forth online also allows clients to work with a lawyer at any hour, from their own homes.

Last year, Michigan Legal Help evaluated how well people did with the organization’s divorce forms in 2014. In Michigan, as in the nation as a whole, two-thirds of LawHelp’s users are seeking a divorce. The group looked only at whether divorces were granted and how fast — a test of whether litigants were legally prepared. They found that people who used Legal Help’s questionnaires concluded their cases faster than other self-represented individuals, and faster than those who used lawyers. This was true even when controlling for the complexity of the case.

What else could technology do? “There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that hasn’t been grabbed yet,” said Stubenberg. “Foreclosure, for instance, deals a lot with whether certain papers were filed at the right time. Banks have to file certain papers in the right order and on the right date.” It’s a significant issue. One study of the behavior of mortgage companies in consumer bankruptcies found that in a majority of cases, the mortgage companies had not complied with the law.

“An app could find all the times the bank made a mistake,” said Stubenberg. “And we could find the clients. We could tell them, ‘You have a house that can be saved because banks screwed up. Would you like us to help you?’ In theory, you’d have a success rate of nearly 100 percent.”

Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception.” She is a co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, which supports rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

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