Itamar Mann An app that empowers people to solve their legal problems TED Fellows
[SHAPE YOUR FUTURE]
I’m going to start by telling you
a story about Danielle.
When she was a senior in college,
Danielle’s dad passed away,
which left her mom
with no way to support herself.
So Danielle had to drop out of college
and pick up three jobs as a barista,
a bartender and a car washer.
Altogether, the three jobs paid Danielle
23,000 dollars per year,
which wasn’t a whole lot,
but it allowed her to feed her mom
and keep a roof over their head.
And for Danielle, that was enough.
But early one morning when Danielle
was driving home from one of her jobs,
a deer ran in front of her car.
She swerved off the road
and crashed into a barn.
And Danielle doesn’t remember
exactly what happened next,
but when she woke up in a hospital
a few hours later,
a doctor told her that she had damaged
her brain stem and C1 vertebrae.
Now, the good news is that Danielle
was going to leave the hospital alive.
But the bad news is that Danielle
had 55,000 dollars in medical bills.
Now, Danielle tried so hard for the next
two years to try and pay back that debt,
but it was impossible.
It was impossible for Danielle to pay back
55,000 dollars in medical bills,
earning just 23,000 dollars per year.
She felt trapped.
One freak accident put Danielle
on the verge of homelessness,
hunger, poverty.
And when you’re in Danielle’s shoes,
bankruptcy is a lifeline.
It’s a powerful legal tool
that allows you to relieve your debt
and re-enter the economy.
Medical emergency, a job loss, a divorce.
These are financial shocks
that could happen to any of us.
And when you’re living
paycheck to paycheck
and don’t have a whole lot of savings,
like so many Americans,
a financial shock can ruin your life.
Bankruptcy gives you a second chance.
But when Danielle went
to go find a bankruptcy lawyer,
she, like so many others
filing for bankruptcy,
learned that it was going
to cost her 1,500 dollars.
She didn’t have that kind of money.
I mean, what a cruel irony.
In America, it costs you
1,500 dollars to tell the court
that you have no money.
When you walk into a court,
everyone from the judge
to the clerk to the forms themselves
will tell you to go find a lawyer,
no matter how little money you have.
One of the great civil rights
injustices in America
is that we don’t have
equal rights under the law.
What we have is equal rights
if you can afford a lawyer.
Whether you’re evicted from your home
in an abusive relationship
or need access to bankruptcy,
you have no right to a free lawyer
in most civil cases.
And because there aren’t
even close to enough
pro bono or legal aid lawyers around,
four out of five low-income Americans
can’t get the legal help they need
to access their civil legal rights.
Four years ago,
I helped start an organization
to fight for new civil right in America,
the right to solve your own legal problem
when you can’t afford a lawyer.
We started with bankruptcy.
Our nonprofit Upsolve has built an app
to help people file for bankruptcy
on their own for free.
People like Danielle.
Our app asks people questions
about their finances
in language they can understand
and then uses this information
to help generate their forms.
Last year, Danielle used Upsolve
to file for bankruptcy
on her own for free.
She got her final letter from the court,
relieving all of her medical debt,
right after Christmas Day.
Today, Danielle has
the highest paying job she’s ever had
and she’s on track to finish her degree.
There are so many opportunities
to create a more just legal system
by empowering people
to solve their own legal problems
whenever possible.
This is especially true
in nonadversarial areas of the law,
things like no-asset bankruptcies,
uncontested divorces
and Social Security disability.
But there are two main barriers
that stand in the way.
The first is legal complexity.
We’ve designed our forms in courts
around lawyers, not regular people.
Many legal forms are like
modern day literacy tests.
When you can’t understand them,
you can’t access your rights.
Every year, poorly designed forms,
courts and processes
deny millions of Americans their life,
their liberty and their property.
Legal complexity
is a civil rights injustice.
To start solving this problem,
we need to require
basic user testing in courts
and reviser assumption
in areas of poverty law
that everybody will be able
to afford a lawyer.
A second barrier is a closed culture.
We’ve been met
with pushback from some folks
who believe that you need
to go see a lawyer
no matter what legal problem you have.
Imagine you had to go see a doctor
to cure a plain old headache
rather than being able to buy Advil
at your local pharmacy.
Telling a person who is poor
to go find a lawyer
when they obviously can’t afford one
is out of touch,
iIntimidating, unfair and wrong.
It’s also a racial injustice.
Black and brown communities
disproportionately cannot afford
the legal fees they need
to access their civil legal rights.
Many legal fees
are like modern day poll taxes.
When you can’t afford to pay the fees,
you can access your rights.
And we have a decision to make
about how open and equal
we want our system of justice to be.
The only way we’re ever going to have
equal rights in America
is if we get rid
of the modern day literacy tests
and poll taxes that dominate
our courts and legal system.
We need a new civil right in America,
the right to solve your own legal problem
when you can’t afford a lawyer.
Because in America, our rights
are supposed to be inalienable,
our protections are supposed to be equal,
and we all deserve a chance at life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness,
whether or not we
can afford the legal fees.
Thank you.