 And with that, I would like to welcome you to our presentation, what legal aid organizations need to know about e-filing for self-represented litigants. And we're very excited to have a great team presenting with us today. We thank you again to SART for partnering with us on this webinar. And today, in terms of presenters, we've got a great lineup. We have Snory Ogata joining us from the Los Angeles County Superior Court, Matthew Neustead from Illinois Legal Aid Online, and Angela Tripp from the Michigan Poverty Law Program. And of course, our great moderator today from ProbonoNet, Claudia Kalindris Johnson. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Claudia. Thank you, Jillian. Welcome, everyone. Happy to see all of you with us. I wanted to start the call by talking about a document that was published in 2012, 2013. And I will put it in the chat box. But this was called the Principles and Best Practices for Access-Friendly Court Electronic e-filing. And this project was the result funded with a TIG grant to Central Minnesota. And it was a working group that Richard Sorza convene for a year, where if you look at page 42, it lists all of the people that participated. And it was ratified by all of the courts that participated in that. At this point in 2012, there was no EFSP certification on process. And we're going to get into the alphabet soon. Snory is going to break down for us the concepts and terminology. But this guide really was thinking, how do we make e-filing friendly for self-represented litigants? And so what I wanted to do is give you an example on how to use the guide, because it's really meant to be a working document. And when we worked on it, we really tried to find real examples so that you could reference those courts and those processes and use that as a guide. So let me just put this on pause for a minute. And I'm going to show you the document. So the advisory group had, it was mostly court really high level managers and court administrators. If you're starting a project, you may want to see who these folks are, because they were involved in writing the guide. So let me give you just a quick example. So let's say that you're looking for how to deal with fee waiver process. An issue that comes a lot. So you look at, OK, fee waiver process. So what do you do? You go to page 10. And every single element of this is formatted the same way. Just bear with me. So every element of the contents describes the issue, describing why it is an issue and how it could be a barrier. And then it provides helpful footnotes based on where we were gathering the information. In this case, it was provided. Some of these was provided by Orange County. So it's not just theoretical speak. And then things that the group agreed on, like waiver should be a barrier to access and that there should be an absence of delay. Everybody in the group and in the process and in the ratification agreed on this. And then it walks through a real concrete language on where we are, where we're not out and examples. And things to look into. Some of them preferring back to public policy or written standard and procedure. So and then at the end, there's a commentary that kind of really reflects the consensus of everybody that worked on this with then finishing off with real examples. At that time, okay, things may have changed now because this is a 2011-2012 data gathering process. But at that time, this is some of the examples and alternatives that we thought would be helpful to present. So for each issue that comes up when designing or purchasing an e-filing solution, each issue is clearly outlined and all of them have these sections. So we consider this to be a working guide and I encourage anyone that is going to be working with self-represented litigants to look at it and use it because it will help you kind of cut through all of the design issues and it may give you some examples and it may really help you have conversations where everybody's starting from the same page. Now, just quickly wanted to give a little bit of background on summary on what law help interactive, which is the national online document assembly to close the justice gap, what we've been up to with e-filing. We basically got started in 2011 with a TIG grant to do a Minnesota integration with a state of the art case management system and we also work with the New York courts to do an e-filing of domestic violence family offense position. They both were in New York, it was a statewide e-filing process and in Minnesota, it was for Heneman County. So we were the first to roll out a state of the art e-filing project for self-represented in the States. With New York, the project is ongoing. It started in 2010 and New York is a little different than the traditional self-represented workflow because in New York is non-attorney volunteers who are trained by a group called Safe Horizons who are helping the victims at self-help centers and shelters in New York file through LHI to the New York court case management system. In 2017, to date, 35, 14 e-filings have been completed through the system and it's very successful and well-received. Now, we are this year, since 2016, we've been working on adding EFSP in quotations capacity to LHI and Snorri's gonna define that, so just bear with me, put that, we're gonna define what an EFSP is. And so what we're aiming to do is to create a standard EFSP approach to LHI so that it can be scalable and applied to other jurisdictions. So right now, Law Help Interactive, we're working with multiple jurisdictions to do e-filing from LHI to state of the art and become an EFSP certified. And so we're working with the Los Angeles County Courthouse to develop a land or tenant self-help workshop. And the e-filing would go through a journal case management system, so that would be the vendor that is managing the case management in Los Angeles. And we're having discussions with other jurisdictions on replications to be able to go from the forms that exist in LHI to the case management system in that court system. We're hoping that by the end of the year, we will be certified to e-file with Journal and Tyler. So that's kind of where we are. So this is our timeline, what we've been working through. Like I said, this is a thick funded project to get us to be able to become EFSP certified. And so by 2018, we hope we'll be able to replicate this with other jurisdictions. So having said that, I'm gonna turn it over to Snorri. Okay, so I'm Snorri Ogata, the CIO in Los Angeles Superior Court and I've been here for just shy of four years and I spent about eight or nine years in the Orange County, California Superior Court before that. So I've been playing in the court space for about 12 to 13 years now. So at the macro 100,000 foot level, this is e-filing. So I always assume that most people understand all the moving parts in e-filing, but you may not be as familiar with the two acronyms that are in the middle. So the EFSP, which is e-filing service provider and EFM, which is e-filing manager and that the role that they play. So the court, the file on the court, I think everybody understands that those are largely the same. So the analog of the EFSP in the paper world is the court runner. So think of this organization having the responsibility to pick up the electronic document from the filer or the filer's legal aid attorney or whoever's helping them with their filings, pick up the money if there's fees involved, pick up the fee waiver form if it's a fee waiver client, bring all of those documents together in an electronic package that get delivered to the EFM, including money if there's any money. And then the analog in the paper world of the EFM is just the clerk at the clerk's window at the court. So it's just a virtual window now instead of a physical window. So the EFM is software, but it allows the court to inspect the electronic submission for completeness and accuracy. So if everything looks good, it passes the information on to the court case management system. If something doesn't look right at that transaction, it gets rejected and the reject notice gets sent back to the EFSP who then notifies the filer that there was a problem with the transaction. That's e-filing at 100,000 feet. So in California, historically, each of the 58 counties ran fairly autonomously. Each county got to choose and implement e-filing when they were ready and they got to implement it, however they saw fit. So unfortunately, not too many courts implemented e-filing and the experience varied from county to county. So two years ago, the state commissioned a statewide approach to e-filing. And like all statewide programs, we started out with some sort of high-minded and principal goals to try to bring uniformity and comprehensiveness to e-filing within the state. So the principal goals are pretty consistent with the 2012 Zorza SRL e-filing guide. So I think that's good news for all of you. You guys spent a lot of time building that document and it was actually being used and we were listening to you at the court's perspective. So the six primary goals that I thought might be of interest to all of you was that we first and foremost, we are adopting and adhering to national standards. California used to have their own proprietary California standard, which was creating confusion in the marketplace. Ensure that there's free filing for indigent and government filers. Ensure that there's consistent access across the state. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about that in a second. That we support all case types. I mean, the legal aid community is mostly concerned about the civil universe, but e-filing from a court perspective needs to be comprehensive and include criminal and juvenile cases as well as the civil and family law types of cases. The ability to support a multitude of different payment types beyond just credit card. And then really important for the courts was that there was still was some local level of control on how they did this. But SRL services were fundamentally at the core of our statewide strategy. So I apologize for overwhelming you with a lot of text on this slide, but I wanted to make sure that you had the information as a takeaway. So the core message on this slide is that while local control is good from a court perspective, it's not always good from a filer perspective. Ensuring consistent access in all counties big and small is really important. So one of the requirements of the statewide program was that all EFSPs, and there are dozens of them currently operating in California must provide services to the same services in Los Angeles and my 11 million people as well as in Alpine County and their 11 hundred people. And so this was a big concern point. So the EFSPs are for-profit companies that are required to provide free services for the indigent population. But at the end of the day, they're in it to make money, which is understandable and just fine. But as you can imagine, the ability to make money in Los Angeles is significantly different than Alpine County with a population of 11 hundred people, they're gonna get a hundred filings a year versus my millions of filings. So we needed to find some mechanisms and control points to ensure that the E-filing service providers, that courier or runner was providing the same level of services at all locations in all counties. So from a California perspective, the EFSP is the core customer service organization. They're the company that bridges between the filer and the court. So in Orange County, for example, Legal Aid Orange County is an E-filing service provider. So the EFSP can be for-profit or non-profit organizations. All they have to do is develop their technical capabilities to adhere to those national standards. We do have a mandate in California that all EFSPs are required to provide free E-filing services for indigent filers. So for California, that's a fee waiver form. If the fee waiver is granted, then the transactions move through without any costs for court filing fees, as well as the convenience fees that are part of the E-filing ecosystem. And in the California model, document assembly, the completion of forms in California is crazy forms and tents. We have 1,000 statewide forms and 2,000 very local forms. So I think last time I inventoryed the number of court forms in California, it was well more, so it's 3,000 statewide. For us, this notion of documents assembly is pushed to the role of the E-filing service provider. So we don't care how the document is assembled from an E-filing perspective. We just wanna ensure that the document is complete and accurate. And so across the state, you'll see at least five variations of document assembly that exist. So the most common one is the fillable forms, right? So this is the, go to the court website, find the form that you're looking for, download it, fill the form, save the form locally, and then print it or upload it for E-filing. So the great thing about that is the PDF forms are ubiquitously available. The bad part is California forms are as confusing as IRS tax forms. Probably a dozen courts in the state are using hot dogs, primarily in a workshop kind of context. So the benefit here is that the forms are assembled and completed with the aid of self-help staff, either from legal aid entities or from the court. The challenge with that is it's still bound by being physically at a courthouse location, so it's not fully scalable. 26 courts in California have selected Tyler Odyssey as their case management system. Those 25 courts effectively cover about 80% of the state's population. So the smaller jurisdictions are picking different case management systems, but biggest thing for the buck from a court volume perspective is gonna be running through a Tyler case management system. Tyler has this companion product called Gaidenfile that they give away to the courts for free that allows courts to create plain language interviews that the litigant or prospective litigant can interact with. And then the result of that plain language interview is you end up with the completed judicial council forms or forms that there's multiple required for a submission. So Tyler Gaidenfile is currently deployed in a test mode in three counties in California, but I think over the next six to nine months you're gonna see an explosion of Tyler courts using this tool set and making it available for a document assembly. And then if that court has also elected to use Tyler e-filing, the transaction completes all the way. So they do plain language interviews and essentially hit the completion button and then the next prompt would be, would you like to e-file this document with court? And then the last type of document assembly or EFSP that does document assembly is companies like Turbo Court, right? Where they're typically for-profit companies that are going after non-indigent self-represented litigants. But from the California viewpoint, we see document assembly and having multiple ways of doing it and having dozens and dozens of e-filing service providers as being ultimately good at the end of the day. It's a little confusing to navigate the options, but by having competition and choice out there, it forces the vendors to provide services that the public wants. So a quick question there. When you're going or when you're working with something like Turbo Court, it does that service per exist in the same place that a guidance file may also exist? Is there competition in the same jurisdiction and just an open data standard? Yeah, so if it's a court that's using Tyler guidance file, and I'll talk to this a little bit in my closing slide into yeah, it's possible that the self-represented litigant is gonna be confronted with all five choices. So that's where they're gonna need some help. We're gonna have to provide assistance in helping them understand, hey, use this vendor for this situation or this vendor for this other one. But yeah, they will be effectively in competition. Excellent, thanks. Okay, so from the California perspective, EFSPs help make the complex simple. So while there are millions of filers and dozens of e-filing service providers and multiple EFMs and 58 courts, so you can imagine if you're a mathematically inclined person, all the possible permutations that could play here. For the vast majority of filers, they see the court universe through a single EFSP lens. So if they happen to be a filer that's doing business in both Los Angeles and Riverside counties, what's an adjacent county to me, they could do all of their transacting through the same e-filing service provider. And so it allows us to create some level of simplicity and the complexity that lives behind the scenes. And so at an engineering level, we sort of manage through that complexity. So the LA story, a great movie from the 90s if you've never seen it. Our world is just going inch by inch, right? We are trying to tackle this e-filing thing. It's very hard to move a jurisdiction as big as LA, but we are live with e-filing currently in small claims and probate. The limited civil is gonna be spinning up in December and we're doing some fun work with the, with Claudie and the pro bono net folks and the LHI folks on a pro bono supported ecosystem. So where they're becoming an EFSP that helps facilitate the unlawful detainer process and workflows. So that's a very exciting one that should be operational by the end of this year. And then in early next year, we'll be introducing e-filing in the juvenile dependency arena, which not too many courts are trying to automate that side of the equation, but we're live on Tyler with juvenile dependency with family law and general civil happening later in the year. So for LA, we're gonna have three flavors of document assembly available that will be marketed to the consumers that are persist specifically targeted as SRLs. We'll continue with our hot docs workshop based method. We're gonna do guide and file. We have these family law, civil harassment and domestic violent restraining orders, guardianship and conservatorship. Those are all spinning up here in the next month or so and will be available as online tool sets. And then as I mentioned, we'll be doing hot docs e-filing soon with UD. And then the end of the story, and this is a teaser maybe for some future webinar is this notion of privileged case access. So once we get a person into the e-filing and the e-universe, if you will, in the court's perspective, we now have the ability to extend that privileged access out. So if you are a legal aid attorney helping someone that has a case filed, we're working on the methods and the architecture right now to allow you as the attorney with the filers through permission to view the entirety of the electronic case file, right? To help facilitate that information sharing. And so we're aggressively working this stuff out and look forward to rolling it out in the next few months. That's me. All right, wonderful. Well, hello everyone. I am Matt Neusett from Illinois Legal Aid Online or LAO. I'll be giving an overview of e-filing in Illinois and I'll be reviewing the challenges faced by self-represented litigants. And then I'll talk about the ways to modify automated documents to work with e-filing systems in Illinois. But some of these techniques will be transferable elsewhere. The Illinois Supreme Court has ordered that e-filing will be required in all civil cases. It became effective in the appellate courts on July 1st, 2017 and it will be mandatory in Illinois Circuit Courts on July 1st, 2018. Some circuit courts in Illinois have already begun e-filing. In Illinois, private entities can set up the e-filing service providers, EFS, set up. Yeah, they can become EFSPs. If they're approved, they will integrate with the court's case management systems. There are currently seven EFSPs in Illinois each with varying requirements and pricing. And different counties are using different EFSPs. However, once a person creates an e-filing account, it works for all EFSPs, so that's helpful. You can probably think of some of the challenges that SRLs face when it comes to e-filing and I'm sure a number of them are documented in the user or the best practices document that Claudia shared at the beginning. Here are the ones that we are seeing as the biggest challenges. First, not all litigants have the ability to use or access to computers, the internet, email accounts or credit cards. Second, it's still not fully developed in Illinois how the fee waiver petitions will be handled. Third, e-file documents have strict file format requirements. They have to be PDFs with searchable text, not images. Fourth is form availability. We're not sure where SRLs will go to get the forms they need to file. Will the circuit court clerks have paper forms in their offices that they can use? Will they be available online? And finally, there's a lack of user documentation. There are no clear, simple instructions on how to e-file. One EFSP has a user guide that's 163 pages long. That's an example. This challenge is understandable though. We have several different systems and judging by what California has, it seems like we will have more in the future. So in light of these challenges and the looming January 2018 deadline, advocates in Illinois are asking the state Supreme Court for exemptions for SRLs or an extension of the implementation date. Right now there are few exceptions to the e-filing requirements in Illinois. People who are incarcerated are exempt and a court can grant discretionary exemption upon good cause shown. Based on that language, advocates in Illinois courts are creating an e-filing waiver. It would let litigants petition for an e-filing exemption if they can demonstrate a hardship through lack of computer access, technology skills or internet connectivity. If they have another access issue such as language or disability or if they're filing a domestic violence case. We're also looking ahead to integrating our A to J interviews directly with Illinois EFSPs, but this is a way off, ways off. In the meantime, LAO is updating our content to help people work with e-filing systems in Illinois. With respect to automated documents, there are several important things to look out for. First, we have to make sure that our hot docs programs produce documents in PDF format. Developers know that it takes time to modify the hot docs program so that it makes a PDF rather than a Word document. SRLs can still use Word documents, but they'll need to convert them to PDF for e-filing. And this may require additional software, instructions, either help from the clerk or elsewhere. Here I'd like to give a quick shout-out to LHI. I've heard they are looking into, make sure this is still working. Okay, sorry, I'm gonna give a quick shout-out to LHI. I've heard they're looking into a PDF conversion tool on the backend for assembled documents. This sounds like a good idea. I encourage you to let them know. Secondly, we have to identify the number of assembled documents that our programs produce. In Illinois, appellate e-filing requires a single PDF. However, circuit courts ask for an individual PDF for each court document, such as a notice, motion, and the proposed order. Hot docs templates can create multiple documents if you use the assemble command rather than insert. Challenge here is that multiple documents means multiple downloads. As a user, it can be hard to be sure that you've downloaded all the documents and to know what to do with each one. Again, I've heard LHI is looking into whether they can incorporate a compression function on the backend to zip all of the documents produced into one download. This sounds like a good idea. Please let them know. Third, our interviews and templates will have to be changed to accommodate e-signatures. To be paperless, the interviews have to ask if people want to e-sign their forms and we'll have to explain what e-signatures are. Also, the instructions need to remind users to review their documents before e-filing. In our templates, we have to add a field on the signature line that includes the S and the user's full name. However, we can't use e-signatures in every form. It can't be used if the form needs to be notarized when it's signed and it only works for the program users if there are other parties that need to sign a form, they will have to print out a paper copy and submit that. This leads to the next important change that we'll have to make are the guided interviews and templates that we may have specific instructions on paper filing. They might say print and sign your forms and bring three copies to the clerk's office. This will have to be changed. So to find and update these instructions, we need to search all the text in our interviews and in our templates and modify them with e-filing instructions. In A to J author six or four, this is very easy. You can just run a report and then you can search that report for text like file, filing, print or copies. In hot docs, the easiest way I've found to search through all the text is to use the hot docs interview text management tool. This is available on LHIs forums portal. Just click on the developer tools tab and then you'll see the program there for download. I've also pasted the link to chat. I'm not sure if that'll be forwarded on to everyone but it's very easy to find if you're familiar with LHIs site. Yeah, so that link is available in chat and we will get it into the write up afterwards. Thank you. Although the program appears kind of daunting, it includes clear instructions on how you can export the text from your hot docs files into a Word document. Then again, you can perform a search on the document for any references to paper filing. Challenge for both of these search and replace methods is that we could end up missing something but we will hear about it if we do. Lastly, Ilya was looking at how we can update references to paper filing in all of our other web content. These references can be found in things like process articles or even videos. Again, the biggest challenge is making sure we find all the content that is impacted by e-filing. I didn't go into depth but it's pretty clear for us anyway that the Illinois e-filing procedures are still being developed. So we'll be working on updating our content continually. Thanks very much everyone. I hope this was helpful. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or ideas. Great, thank you Matthew. You do have just a quick comment from Jessica Frank on explaining some shortcuts. I'm going to go ahead and see if I can unmute Jessica here. I'm going to go ahead and unmute Jessica really quick for a few quick comments. Jessica, you should be unmuted. Yes, thank you. Hi, all this is Jessica from A to J Author. I just wanted to add to Matt's explanation of how to search for text in an interview in A to J. You can do it like Matt said on the publish tab in A to J four or six but in six it's also browser based. So you can just go to the text tab, the all text. It's one of the tabs along the left side shows you all the text in your interview. You can do a control F or however you search your browser with a Mac and then you can do find and replace super quickly too. So you can use the functions that are built into your browser too as an added bonus. That's great, thanks. Thanks Jessica. Thanks. Okay, and just to let people know the hot dogs text management tool was actually developed with our next panelist Angela Tripp. It was a tick funded grant and the idea was to allow developers and owners who wanted to pull all the language of the calculations and the components and all of what makes a hot dogs interview pull it out into specific reports and then translate those or change those. So you could use it for plain language like if you wanna move your content or certain parts of your interview to plain language or you could use it to put it in another language like a target language. So it's a very flexible tool and if anybody is developing in LHI and you wanna find out more about it feel free to reach out. I guess we have a video for training that we did in April of last year and we really want the community to, it saves you hours. So Angela is the presenter now. All right, excellent. Thank you Claudia and thank you Matthew for showcasing our text management tool and coming up with another really good youth for it. That makes me really happy. And if I hadn't already submitted my final tick evaluation report I would slide that in. But I am gonna talk with you for a few minutes about what we are doing in Michigan and what we have learned in terms of e-filing and self-represented litigants just to bring another perspective. So the Michigan experience to date is kind of a unique one. We started with five pilot projects around the state. These were in a variety of courts. Three of them were in the big urban centers around Detroit and then there was one in the Northern Lower Peninsula and one on the West side in sort of smaller, more rural areas. They used different vendors. They had kind of pretty vague rules. They had different fees. And the idea was that the state court administrative office wanted to get a feel for how e-filing would work with our various courts and their various courts case management systems. And so they supported, they allowed these five pilot projects and they were very successful. But the state decided the scale, I'm just gonna use the short acronym scale that stands for our state court administrative office. And it was decided that they really wanted a statewide solution. Michigan is a pretty big state with a lot of small rural counties. They don't have a lot of money and some big urban centers that do have a lot of money. And we just wanted to make e-filing available to everyone regardless of where they were and what their local funding was. So they wanted to come up with one solution that would work everywhere across the state. And so we began that process. In 2013, around there, the scale organized some large work groups to talk about court rules and e-filing standards. There were several different committees. They also looked at website design and some other technology implementation issues. And but some of the committees were focused on e-filing and through the work group process they drafted court rules and e-filing standards. At that time, because e-filing wasn't statewide, those court rules and standards just stayed in draft form. And then we all just took a long pause. I don't work for the courts, I just work closely with them and I don't know exactly what happened during that pause but I know that one of the things that happened was some politicking. The state court administrative office was dedicated to providing statewide e-filing without convenience fees. That was one of the lessons from the pilot projects. And so it was a big challenge to consider how to fund a statewide e-filing without convenience fees. So during this pause, they worked with the legislature and the legislature eventually passed a law that allowed for the increase in filing fees across the board, different increases for different courts, but to account to contribute money to a fund that SCAO could use to fund their statewide e-filing project. Last minute addition to that bill was a five-year sunset period. So it's not a permanent solution at this point but we're hoping that things will be working so smoothly at the end of that sunset period that the legislature will agree to keep the filing fees increased. We in the legal services community really love this solution because it allowed for low income clients who were able to get fee waivers to still have access to e-filing without additional fees. There's always a question when fees are waived, whether convenience fees will also be waived. And so when there's no convenience fees, that's not an issue at all. And even raising the filing fees doesn't impact the low income clients if they have fee waivers. So we all took a break. Well, I took a break. I'm sure lots of other people at SCAO were still working on this project. And then after they got the funding, they convened a smaller work group to work on what became their e-filing RFP. They convened four smaller topic focus work groups, mostly comprised of court staff, judges, clerics, administrative folks to talk about e-filing and what we were looking for in a vendor. And so an RFP was created and released and lots of work was done, submitting bids. And then the same work groups evaluated the proposals and attended and evaluated the vendor demonstrations. We all contributed to this very complex and cool scoring process that SCAO used when making their final selection of a vendor. And the final vendor was selected earlier this year. It is image soft. And so that their contract was finished and they began work a couple of months ago. So we are still, we're sort of in the beginning of the process, but there was a lot of work getting to this point. One of the things that I'm very grateful for is how involved Michigan Legal Help was in the court process. And I think it's really vital to an easy integration. And so I wanted to share some of the factors that I think helped and led to this. First of all, we have a history of working very closely with the courts, both locally and on a statewide basis with SCAO. From the very beginning in 2011, when we started on this project, we worked with SCAO's court forms committees. Anytime they change, we have statewide forms that are approved by the court administrative office and every court must accept those forms. And so that contributes greatly to the success of Michigan Legal Help because we have the ability to have great impact. And so we're able to, we work with SCAO to change those forms, make new forms. We also work closely with courts. They invite us to trainings, to train new judges to present judges conferences. We get a lot of face time with judges that way. Courts also help us a lot by referring people to Michigan Legal Help. So we have a long history of working very collaboratively with the court system. I think that helped us here. We also were involved in early brainstorming and visioning around e-filing. Personally, anytime I had a chance to talk to anyone who had any influence over e-filing, I would talk to them about how great it could be to integrate with Michigan Legal Help and how we could do a data integration and how we could work on that aspect and make a really great e-filing system that provided great service to self-represented litigants. And so I'd like to believe that I influenced some of the early conversations within SCAO and that we were part of the conversation and consideration from the very beginning. It really helps that the courts value what we bring, particularly our forms. We are funded by the Supreme Court, by the State Court Administrative Office, and they absolutely, not absolutely, they rely on us heavily for self-help. They have some self-help materials on their website, but they have been taking them down little by little as Michigan Legal Help grows bigger and bigger. And they, with the intent of deferring to Michigan Legal Help as the primary online source of forms specifically. And so because they value what we bring in terms of forms, they wanna make sure that this new giant e-filing system that is all focused around forms integrates really well with what Michigan Legal Help has available right now. And so as a result, I was involved in all the steps in the process that were sort of open to committees. And I was the only non-court staff member for the most part involved in this process. And so it was really great to be involved, really helpful. I hope that I brought a lot to the conversation as well. And it just, being part of the conversation from the very beginning really helps integration in the end. Of course, we're in the middle of this process. So I don't know that it will be a roaring success, but I feel hopeful that it will be. On that note, I wanna talk a little bit about our hopes and dreams for e-filing integration and what we're working towards. Obviously, e-filing of forms completed on LHI. We have a library of almost 50 interviews on Law Help Interactive, combination of hot docs and A to J author interviews. And at the very least, we want to make it easy for people to e-file those documents after they're completed. So when they finish their interview, they can print email or e-file. But we're hoping for more. We want full data integration. We want to go beyond uploading and downloading PDFs. We want a system where the litigants data flows directly into the court's case management systems from Law Help Interactive. So the litigants name, address, case type, the opposing party name, address, children, anything that the court needs to put into their database, they can pull directly from the data and make that a smooth transition and help the courts be more efficient in what they're doing. We also really want a user-friendly e-filing interface for self-represented litigants. I have done many presentations with Rachelle Klempner in New York and I know that their e-filing system was rolled out first. And then they said, oh, we need a self-represented portal. And it was really hard to sort of tack on a self-represented portal at the end. And so we're hoping that because we're starting this now and benefiting from the experience of lots of other folks that we can start with a user-friendly e-filing interface that runs parallel to the more sophisticated attorney interface. And then our biggest dream is to turn the e-filing, the self-represented litigant e-filing portal into a full-on case management system for litigants. Self-represented litigants typically only do one, maybe two cases in their lifetime. They're not gonna use Clio, they're not gonna use Pica, they're not gonna use really anything. And so if the e-filing portal can have the ability to transmit information both into the case management, court's case management systems and out of those case management systems, we could set up automatic reminders to litigants about case actions, court hearings. We could say, hey, remember your motion hearing is scheduled for next Tuesday. Case actions, they could get reminders about, you filed your divorce 60 days ago, you haven't filed a proof of service yet, your proof of service has to be filed within 90 days. If you need more help, here's a link back to Michigan Legal Help or a self-help center or somewhere where you could get help doing service or you filed your proof of service, it's been 30 days, no answer has been filed. If you would like to file a default, here's a link to information about default. So that kind of additional structured support for self-represented litigants would be really helpful in their smooth litigation of their cases. And if the e-filing portal was related to Michigan Legal Help, then it's easier for us to provide that level of assistance without the court's feeling uncomfortable that maybe they're getting too involved in the lives of litigants and Michigan Legal Help has the ability to do a little bit more of that direct interaction without running into potential trouble. So it's one thing to have pipe dreams and it's another thing to try to figure out how to make them real. So these are some of the elements that I think will enable us to realize our dreams and then some of the things that I hope for. Number one, I already mentioned this, having statewide forms makes all of this possible. We couldn't make 50 interviews for 83 different states. So we can only make 50 interviews for one uniform form process. So that helps us do what we do at scale. The second thing that really helps in that same vein is a statewide e-filing system. We're only gonna have one EFSP, we're only gonna have one EFM. Once we're integrated, we're integrated. We don't have to try to figure out how to do it a couple different times or a couple different ways. And if something breaks, we only have to fix it in one place. So this is another thing that will allow us to work at capacity. Right now, we're looking at either working to create a separate EFSP to integrate while help interactive and image softs true filing system or true filing will build a bridge to LHI to integrate with our existing library of do it yourself form tools. We're all the parties are working together right now to figure out which of these options is best. I'll let you know in a couple months. One of the things that is a great result of the collaboration that we have with the courts is that from the beginning, they were dedicated to an e-filing system that worked with our already existing library. Like I said, we have almost 50 interviews that complete over 200 different forms. The courts said we want to integrate what you have and they weren't going to hire a vendor that said, okay, you've got to start over, scrap everything and rebuild everything in a different format. So that's another factor that's going to help us realize our dreams. And that's just one indication of the dedication to collaboration and flexibility that the courts and Michigan legal help both have on e-filing. This is some uncharted territories for all of us and so this dedication to working together and being flexible is going to help us succeed. Some of the challenges that we're going to face, even though we have one e-filing system, courts have different CMSs. So that will present a challenge. Being a part of a huge amount of change happening in courts will be a challenge. So five of 83 counties have e-filing. And so those five counties, some of them are having to get a, you know, having to change because now they all have to be on true filing. And then the other remaining 78 counties, this is totally new to them. So it's a challenge to be a new part of something totally new and it's a, you know, it's going to take years for this to roll out and it's a huge project. And so that reduces, you know, that reduces some bandwidth at the state court administrative office and that reduces our flexibility because, you know, we're trying to inch by inch just like California make this happen. And so, and anytime you're integrating two systems, you're going to run into challenges. One of the challenges that is slightly unique is the long-term funding for both e-filing in Michigan and a self-represented litigant portal. That's one of the things that we're trying to figure out right now. And then, you know, right now, everything that we have is on LHI, but it's hard to know in the future what tool platforms might be in use. So part of our flexibility may have to be all of us rolling and changing together if different platforms become popular. Finally, just a few words on how we use the e-filing best practices report just to sort of tie it back around to where we started. Because our e-filing process in Michigan really took off in 2013, it was great to be able to share that report with the SCAO staff at the beginning of the process. And it was helpful when we were drafting rules, especially those related to fees, fee waivers, and access. It was great to have that information and guidance. The guidance was also helpful in the desire to start the portal, the self-represented focused portal. So recommendations, anyone that's in the middle of this or about to start, we encourage you that if it's going to impact the communities that you serve, is to start getting involved right now. And probably the best thing to do is go back to that guide and skim through the issues that you know from working with people that are gonna be potential points of inflection and focus on those. Because there's a lot of things that can go on. So figure out where you can be most effective and get involved early. You heard that in some states, the access to justice boards are involved. They can be helpful. It could be time consuming to bring an A2J board to this level of understanding the nitty gritty, but it's always good to keep them in mind because they may be able to help move the process along. The other thing is, like Snorri said, build everything that's going to be used by SRLs around their needs. And make sure that what you build has really good and easy feedback looks and that you're committed to taking that feedback so that you can think of this as an iterative process, not a project that's gonna be built once, and then it's never gonna be improved or changed upon. If you're working with regular folks, you're gonna have to keep changing it, improving it as you know that it's working better. So budget for that too. It's a sustainability, but the feedback is really important. The other thing is plain language and making sure everything is really accessible from a reading or oral visual learners. Think about all of that, particularly the things that are not in the forms. You may think of videos. You may think of maps, process maps and things like that before people start the process so that you don't have 143 pages guide, but you have maybe a one page map, a flow chart, things like that. And the last thing is if you are running the project, if you are going to be the decision maker, include, be specific and thoughtful about who you include. Don't just include the same people in the same organization who have the same institutional agenda. Bring advocates, bring people that are looking at access to justice, bring technology people from other realms and the more well thought out the planning group or the decision making feedback that you get at the end, you're gonna have a better product. So I pulled some resources of other presentations that I've seen that were helpful on e-filing and SRLs. Some come from the 2015 Core Technology Conference and I actually pulled the link to all of the videos for the Core Technology Conference. There were multiple sessions in this year conference. You can watch the videos, they're really nice quality, but and I encourage you to, if you have time, if you're curious to see what other courts or what's happening with e-filing for SRLs in other states to check that out. I didn't put it here, but I highly encourage anyone to also follow the Core Technology bulletin that is published by Jim McMillan at the National Center for State Courts. He once in a while puts updates on what's going on on e-filing, what the current standard is, real case studies on specific courts, and if you're into court and access to justice and self-represented litigants, the Core Technology bulletin may be something that you subscribe to and check out every once in a while. Lastly, feel free to reach out to any of us as presenters. Gotta point out that my colleague, I think Miranda Migueli is also on the call and she's been working on e-filing here at LHI, so feel free to reach out to any of us and our contact info was in our slides if you need them. So there was a little bit of discussion about getting access to justice boards involved in the process. Could you go a little bit more in depth as to what role or how they can really be useful in this process? In Washington state, we've got a non-unified court system and we have many of the same challenges that California had and we have a very active access to justice board. And so the technology decisions are gonna be done by local court IT administrators as opposed to by an administrative office of the court in Seattle? Yes. I think that's kind of concept. So instead of having a centralized court system, I think that in most states, that's what you're going to find out and I don't know, Angela or Matthew, if you wanna weigh in. These things generally start at the county level with one county trying to do this and eventually it progresses where it becomes maybe a group of counties trying to do the same thing. Snoy, do you wanna comment on how it happened in California because I know that when you guys were on the two Jeff standard, it was county by county and some counties had excluded themselves, but then eventually it cannot coalesce into 28 counties using the same vendor and then the rest using another vendor. I don't know if the history of evolution in California may be of interest because you set standards for EFSPs. And I think that once at the state level, the policy sets a standard. Like it says, okay, anybody that meets this standard can become EFSP certified and that becomes transparent. That's when then you have more uniformity. So in terms of getting involved, you have to figure out who is going to be setting the standard. Yeah, and I think you captured the history correctly. So in California anyhow, it was 10 years ago that the first courts were starting to do e-filing, but it was completely controlled at a local level. And the courts played the role of the standards body, if you will, that would work with the e-filing community to create the capabilities up. But as we're 10 years into this journey, as I mentioned in my presentation, that works great for the larger counties, but it falls completely apart for the smaller counties. And so that's what sort of compelled the state to say, okay, there's a critical mass of activity happening at a handful of large courts. We need to move this up to a state level. I will tell you though, once the standard is set, Ray and Ducati's point, I think there's 35 or 36 e-filing service providers that are providing these services to about a dozen or so courts that use tighter odyssey case management system and Tyler e-filing. So the market does sort of grow very quickly and exponentially once the standard rules are defined. So what's that responsive start? Did we answer that? I mean, that hit the non-unified, but it missed how, what role does the ATJ border commission play in this? Are they setting the standards? That seems rather technical for them, like that. Okay. I think that every ATJ board functions a little bit different. You know, and in some states, I know that they have requested presentations on e-filing updates and things like that. In other states, they're not involved in that. They're doing, they may be doing the state planning work that's going on with the public welfare foundation and stuff like that. So it will really state by state, but sometimes legal aid staff is in the ATJ board or may staff, maybe part of the staff that helps organize those meetings. So I think that you need to find out who is in your ATJ board, either as a staff person or as a board member and start bringing up the topic for discussion if you think it's something that will impact the people that your group or organization serves or represents. All right. I can definitely get it before them. It's just, what is the ask for them? What do you wanna ask them? To review it and to... Just, do I hand them the standards and say, hey, this is what California did. Can we endorse it and try to push it forward in our state? Like getting it before the ATJ board here is not the issue. I'm sure they would look at it. It's just, what do I ask them to do? I think that they can issue a statement and say what is it that they want to expect, right? They could request a briefing from all the parties that are involved. They could say these are the most important things from the guide. We really wanna make sure that waivers are factored in and that we're not excluding people. You could, you know, they're gonna have to decide. Every state is gonna have a different technology and a different set of permutations. So they need to focus on the access issues. And so, you know, have them weigh in on from their perspective that if they are a true planning ATJ board, they can focus on the things that they know from the presentations that they hear from the policymakers or the vendors on where the rubber is gonna meet the road. That's gonna be the bear. This is Nori. We'll offer one thing that you may wanna consider. So as the 12 or so lead courts in that are developing the Tyler Guidenfile interviews, we're moving along. Part of our strategy was to reach out to the lead communities. So we didn't have a access to justice board per se that was directing and driving us because we are sort of 58 little independent victims that are trying to work together. But we did intentionally campaign out to the legal aid offices in many of those counties and invited them to, well, we gave them some education on what we were, the journey we were about to start. And then as we were developing the plain language interviews, we would release the beta version of the interviews out to that broad community to solicit input and feedback on whether or not we were hitting the mark or if they had concerns or questions. And we got varying results. Some legal aid offices participated more and were active contributors in providing feedback. And some did less. But that is one way to move an access to justice policy board from sort of thinking theoretically all the time into moving into sort of practical implications because you then are sort of confronted with, okay, how does this change my behaviors in my clinics? What can I do to influence the court design of these solution sets to make my office more efficient? And so I thought those conversations were good. So that might be a possible avenue for you. That's very helpful. Any other questions or comments? Did anybody have any questions about EFSP, FEM? I mean, those are gonna be the things that get thrown around as slang. And they're gonna be different in each state. But like I think understanding those two pieces will really help you be an active participant in the discussion. And I think Snorri defined it really well. We're ending a little bit early, but we wanted to thank you for attending today.