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¡El paquete de herramientas "Maneras de comprar una vivienda sin una hipoteca: conozca los riesgos" ahora está disponible en español! Este paquete de herramientas le cuenta sobre tres maneras comunes de comprar una vivienda en Michigan sin una hipoteca, y los riesgos asociados con estas compras.

Have you ever gone on vacation and left your child with a caregiver? If you leave your children with someone who is not a legal parent, you may want to consider giving them temporary legal power to make decisions for your child. This can be done with a Delegation of Parental Authority (DPA), also known as a Short-Term Parental Power of Attorney. Parents have the legal power to make decisions for their kids like choosing when and where their child goes to the doctor, consenting to medical treatment, and making decisions related to school. Anyone who is not a parent cannot make these decisions without a legal document or court order. When a parent leaves a child in someone else’s care, they may want to temporarily transfer parental powers to the caregiver. A parent with sole or joint custody can do this with a DPA. 

A DPA can be used when parents go on a trip without their children, when a parent would like to allow a step-parent to take their child to the doctor, or if a parent is concerned they might be detained by immigration authorities. You can also use a DPA to name someone to care for your children if you are entering drug treatment or going to jail for less than 6 months. A DPA can be used to consent to medical treatment and to enroll children in school and other activities. The DPA only gives the caregiver power to make decisions for the child while the parent is gone. In other words, even if there is a DPA the caregiver does not have the right to interfere with parenting decisions when a parent is present. DPAs are also temporary. They last a maximum of 6 months, but another can be signed after the DPA expires. The parent can choose to end the DPA at any time by telling the caregiver they are ending it.

Visitors to MichiganLegalHelp.org can learn more about DPAs by taking a look at the I Need a Delegation of Parental Authority (Short-Term Parental Power of Attorney) toolkit. The toolkit contains detailed information about getting a DPA as well as the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tool that can be used to generate a DPA. The DIY tool has been used to create 136 of these forms from January 1 to June 30, 2019. 

The Michigan Legal Help Program is also excited to announce that the DIY tool is now available in Spanish! The tool is accompanied by a Spanish translation of the DPA toolkit, Necesito una delegación de autoridad parental (poder legal de derechos de paternidad a corto plazo). As with other content on MichiganLegalHelp.org that is available in English and Spanish, the visitor can toggle back and forth between the two versions with the “English” and “Español” buttons at the top-right of the page. The addition of the DIY DPA tool in Spanish is part of the Michigan Legal Help Program’s commitment to producing accessible and effective content for people handling a legal problem on their own. To take a closer look at the content the Michigan Legal Help Program has available in Spanish, visit AyudaLegaldeMichigan.org.

The Legal Climate in 2010

On August 17th of this year, MichiganLegalHelp.org celebrated it’s 6th birthday! In honor of that, this article will explore the beginnings of Michigan Legal Help (MLH) and how far it has come since its inception. First and foremost, MLH is a resource for Self-Represented Litigants (SRLs).
In 2010 Michigan courts were seeing many SRLs, and the same is true today; however, in 2010 the resources available to these litigants were often disjointed, outdated, and incomplete. These resources were not very well adapted to the internet either. Most of the forms provided were simple PDFs and the websites were not being properly maintained and updated. In addition to less than satisfactory forms, there was also a lack of quality educational resources informing SRLs about their legal issue or procedure of interest. As far as staffed, brick-and-mortar legal assistance centers, there were only three in the state; those in Berrien, Kent, and Washtenaw Counties.
A further obstacle for SRLs at this time was the fact that Michigan did not yet have an “unbundling” ethics rule that would allow a lawyer to perform individual tasks for a client while not taking responsibility for their entire case. Unbundling can allow the client to have much more affordable attorney fees while still receiving quality assistance from a professional. This procedure was already allowed in other states at the time but was not yet sanctioned in Michigan.

The Birth of MLH

Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Marilyn Kelly noticed these shortcomings and decided that something had to change. In April of 2010, she created the Solutions on Self-Help Task Force in order to “promote greater centralization, coordination and quality of support for the self-represented in Michigan.” Chief Justice Marilyn Kelly advocated for these changes in the legal system with the belief that they would increase the public’s faith and confidence in the legal system, increase the efficiency of the legal process, and lighten administrative burdens on the court. Chief Justice Kelly recommended six different actions to reach this goal; one of which was to create a statewide website dedicated to SRLs and modeled after IllinoisLegalAid.org. This website eventually grew into MichiganLegalHelp.org.

In August of 2012, the MLH website was launched with much of the functionality that it currently has. It provided toolkits, articles, and Do-It-Yourself form tools for common legal issues and procedures in civil law. It also exhibited a feature that allowed visitors to find lawyers and community service organizations near them. When the website initially launched it contained content organized into five categories: Consumer, Family, Protection Orders, Landlord/Tenant, and Expungement. By April 2013, the website already had over 500,000 pageviews and provided 26 toolkits, 70 articles, 290 Common Questions (with answers), and 13 DIY forms. Toolkits available at this time included: I Need a Personal Protection Order, I Need a Divorce, I’m Being Evicted for Non-Payment of Rent, and I Have an Adult Conviction That I Would Like to Set Aside. Contained within the appropriate toolkits were DIY form tools for Divorce, Expungement, Personal Protection Orders and more. By this time, MLH had also launched four Self-Help Centers in Oscoda, Allegan, Oakland, and Wayne Counties. Self-Help Centers are physical locations of the Michigan Legal Help Program, often contained within libraries and courthouses, where visitors can get free access to the internet, computers, printers, and help navigating the website. As you can see, MLH was launched with a strong foundation that we continue to build on today.

Expanding on Our Mission

Michigan Legal Help is still being guided by the same goal as when it began: to provide a free, accurate, and accessible source of legal information for those who do not have legal representation. Furthermore, Michigan Legal Help strives to provide legal information on the topics most relevant to our audience; low-income Michigan residents. In this regard, the website has vastly improved upon what was offered in 2012. Currently, as of September 2018, MichiganLegalHelp.org provides a total of 64 Toolkits, 237 Articles, 730 Common Questions (with answers) and 49 Do-It-Yourself Tools that generate 149 possible forms. The legal issues and procedures we now cover include topics like: domestic violence and divorce, revoking paternity established by marriage, illegal eviction, and many more. Between the launch of the website (August 17, 2012) and July 31, 2018, the website has received over 15.2 million pageviews. From January 1, 2018 to June 30, 2018 alone, our DIY Form tools have been used to generate over 46,000 sets of forms with an average of 256 sets of forms generated a day.

We have not only been adding more traditional content but also improving the website’s functionality. In June 2013, we optimized MichiganLegalHelp.org for mobile devices. We now see this as a core part of our philosophy. Research shows that low-income internet users are more likely to access the internet exclusively through a mobile device and less likely to have broadband internet at home. Being optimized for mobile devices helps us stay connected to our target audience and facilitate our original mission. In September 2013 we launched LiveHelp, our online chat service dedicated to helping visitors navigate the website in real time.

As another extension of our mission, the Michigan Legal Help Program launched our Spanish mirror site, AyudaLegaldeMichigan.org, in September 2014. This is a website with Spanish language versions of all of our content from MichiganLegalHelp.org. Yet another step towards increasing our usability came with the addition of the Guide to Legal Help in October of 2017. The Guide to Legal Help is an online legal triage system where visitors answer a handful of questions concerning their demographic factors, eligibility for services, the type of legal issue they are experiencing, and the urgency of their legal problem. All of this data is used to give the user personalized information about their legal issue and refer them to direct services from an appropriate attorney (legal services or private bar) or other professional. The Guide to Legal Help is currently being integrated with each Michigan legal aid offices’ case management system.

After the integration, visitors eligible for legal aid can begin filling out the online intake application directly after they’ve completed the Guide to Legal Help. All of their Guide answers will be transferred there so that they do not have to input the same information twice. This function is already live in some parts of the state and we hope to have the entire state integrated by the end of the year. We also continue to open new Self-Help Centers across the state and can now proudly say that we have 18 Michigan Legal Self-Help Centers and 4 Partnering Legal Resource Centers, covering a total of 21 counties; just over a quarter of the state. We are honored to have been able to serve Self-Represented Litigants in Michigan for 6 years now and look forward to continuing to do so for many more.

Michigan Legal Help just introduced its latest content area: Immigration! This new section contains the Immigration Basics toolkit and 5 articles, with information about family based immigration, becoming a citizen, removal, and other topics. Our toolkit also contains Common Questions that can provide answers to your specific immigration-related questions. Please tell us what you think about our new content area! Stay tuned for more Immigration toolkits in the future…