LSC/SJI Partnership Yields Results
The Legal Services Corporation (LSC) and SJI began working to tighten the bonds between courts and legal aid providers in FY 2006. This partnership continues to provide additional resources to develop collaborative efforts between the courts and legal service programs in order to better serve self-represented and low-income litigants across the United States. The number of individuals choosing to represent themselves in the courts is increasing, and there is not enough support available to help them with legal matters. As a result, innovative technology projects have been developed to fill this gap. One example is the Access to Justice (A2J) project, which enabled courts and legal services programs to develop Internet-based programs to provide self-represented litigants better access to the courts. The second is a project called HotDocs, developed to support pro bono attorneys who service low-income litigants. HotDocs is a software program used to create online forms and pleadings. Once a form has been created and uploaded to the web site, self-represented litigants can fill in the form by answering questions and entering the information requested. The software then combines the information and supplies a finished form that can be saved and printed.
LSC recently reported some statistics from the utilization of the HotDocs Server. During the second quarter of 2007, the National Document Assembly server delivered 34,625 interviews, and assembled 18,914 documents, bringing the 2007 totals to 68,157 interviews and 38,682 assembled documents. Compared to the totals for the first and second quarters of 2006, this is an approximately 48 percent increase in the number of delivered interviews, and a 125 percent increase in the number of assembled documents. SJI is proud to have been able to contribute to these successes, and is planning to continue these joint efforts in the future.
