In Pittsburgh, reengineering was the key to serving Self-Represented Litigants (SRLs), resulting in the opening of the court’s  Family Division Self-Help Center  (SHC), which doubled the number of customers served while offering a more sophisticated set o ...

Over the years, legal aid programs developed complex intake protocols and decision trees to help manage their crushing caseload. Initially, these screening tools were simply paper documents that intake staff could use. Then, as telephone hotlines develope ...

Various Supplementary Resources: Listen to a piece about ERP on NPR Learn more about the self-help services in Alaska for family law cases (opens as PDF) Early Resolution for Family Law Cases in Alaska's Courts Faster, Cheaper & As Satisfying: An ...

The Judicial Council of California, with support from the Public Welfare Foundation, produced a nine minute video about the San Francisco's Access Center that explains what a self-help center is and how it provides triage and self-help services to se ...

  An estimated 77 million Americans have a debt that has been turned over to a private collection agency. Thousands of these debtors are arrested and jailed each year because they owe money. Millions more are threatened with jail. The debts owed can be as ...

On its webpage entitled, Efficiencies & Innovations (courts.ca.gov), the The California judicial branch, which is widely acknowledged as a national leader in developing and implementing programs that enhance access to justice, provides information and ...

The Alaska Court System, in partnership with the Alaska Pro Bono Program, created the Early Resolution Program (ERP) to address many issues with which courts across the country are grappling: how to efficiently and effectively manage divorce and custody c ...

In this seminal article, Richard Zorza discusses the fact that we know little of the processes by which the millions of people who approach courts, legal aid intake systems, and hotlines are directed into them, or the access services they do or do not rec ...

In this article in Slaw, Canada's on-line legal magazine, Kari Boyle reviews some of the triage activity in Canadian Civil Justice Reform.  About the author: Kari D. Boyle is the Executive Director of the Vancouver-based Mediate BC Society, which off ...

Article by Richard Zorza on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Turner v. Rogers (2011) and how courts should see this decision as an opportunity to improve their services and programs for self-represented litigants. Recommended Citation: Richard Zorza, ...