Online Legal Self-Help Centers on the Rise
by Ashley Matthews
With budget cuts and staff reductions to legal aid organizations widening the barrier to access legal information, many states are coming up with innovative ways to reach their most vulnerable populations.
Most counties in Illinois, for instance, are launching online legal self-help centers for low-income residents. From the State-Journal Register in Springfield, Illinois:
A free online legal self-help center will be accessible to anyone with a computer connected to the Internet. Public access computers also are available at the Carlinville Public Library.
The center will provide legal information in civil matters for people who can’t hire a lawyer and can’t find either a pro bono attorney or a legal aid lawyer to help them. It also contains non-court-related information on topics like Social Security, Medicare, unemployment compensation and others.
Joseph Dailing, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Equal Justice, which helped plan the project, said users go first to a common website for all 91 such centers statewide. From there, they can access an individual county home page. That page contains information on six topics selected locally, he said.
The Macoupin legal self-help center is one of 91 throughout Illinois, each in a separate county.
“In the larger counties, such as Sangamon, the centers are in the circuit court clerk’s offices in the courthouses,” Dailing said. “They are in libraries in the smaller counties.”
Although anyone with computer access can use the center, Dailing said topics featured on the site “are the kinds of legal problems typically encountered by lower-income individuals.”
The online centers were funded by the Illinois Equal Justice Foundation, and the sites are maintained by Illinois Legal Aid Online. While the site will offer general legal information about common legal subjects like divorce and foreclosure, it will not provide any legal advice.