Our team and the partners that guide our work have always recognized the need for increased access to justice. In order to provide the best legal help information, interactive self-help tools and connections to local legal and community resources, we have listened to the needs of our users and our partner organizations that serve low-income, underserved and vulnerable communities.

Through our data gathering, we know that our typical user visits the website on their mobile phone at all hours of the day and night. They are often in a household of at least 3 people, and their household income is less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level. Nearly half of our users are facing homelessness, experiencing or have experienced violence or abuse, over the age of 60 or a veteran. This means the design of our website and the information it contains must be user friendly, easy to understand and action oriented in order to provide accessible legal help.

We also monitor the pages that are visited the most. Our top pages visited in 2022 were our Eviction Timeline, the Divorce Process in Ohio, Landlord Repairs, Dissolution, and Protection Orders. This information coupled with our user demographics, show that as coronavirus (COVID-19) benefits ended, our users turned to Ohio Legal Help to solve core legal issues impacting their daily lives. 

In addition to serving 740,560 users in 2022, we also made over 206,000 referrals to Ohio’s courts, legal aids, private bar associations and local social service agencies.

In addition to our own analysis for continuous improvement of our website, we were selected by the Pew Charitable Trusts for an independent evaluation examining online legal assistance portals. Ohio Legal Help was recognized as a national exemplar in providing accessible and high-quality legal information. Evaluators highlighted our digital inclusiveness strategies as best practices that enable people with low educational levels or disabilities to use our site. We believe that literacy levels and disabilities should never be a barrier to accessing legal information.

This past year we commissioned a study to learn about Black Ohioans’ legal needs and trust in the civil justice system. While research exists about the Black community’s perception of the criminal justice system, there is very little public research about the community’s views of the civil justice system. The results of the study provide valuable insight for developing strategies to make the civil justice system more accessible to Black Ohioans. The study was conducted through an online survey of 277 respondents who self-identified as Black or African American.

Although more than 75 percent of respondents said they had moderate, a little or no trust in the civil justice system, we learned that Black Ohioans who had direct experience with the system had more positive attitudes and a higher level of trust in the system. This tells us that earning the trust of Black Ohioans is critical to closing the justice gap.

Black Ohioans also said they do trust racial equity and community-impact focused organizations like the NAACP, the Urban League, and 2-1-1 or United Way. Additionally, 86 percent of study respondents said they were open to using a website to resolve their legal issues. Respondents also said that messages related to empowerment and access to legal information or resources resonated the most them. Providing Black Ohioans a trusted website can empower them to take action to resolve their legal issues.

Prior to the findings of the study, Ohio Legal Help began a partnership with the Cleveland Branch of the NAACP. Through this partnership came a joint project to create a new, streamlined online intake form for racial discrimination complaints. This past year, the Ohio Legal Help team built and launched the new intake form in partnership with the NAACP. In July 2022, the new form launched and the NAACP legal team reviews each complaint to determine whether they can aid in the claim or provide a referral to another community resource. The Civil Justice Study findings only solidified that this partnership is critical to empowering Black Ohioans to take action to resolve their legal issues.

As we work to build trust with Black Ohioans and other underserved communities, we use data to guide our content and action plans. For example, the Civil Justice Study found that debt collection was the most common legal issue our respondents had faced. Yet while 52 percent of them reported direct experience with debt collections, only 17 percent sought help from a lawyer. Thanks to a generous grant from the Columbus Bar Foundation, Ohio Legal Help is partnering with the Franklin County Municipal Court’s Self Help Resource Center to develop legal information, court forms and tools to help Franklin County residents deal with issues related to debt collection.

The core principle of user-centered and fairness by design is to meet users where they are. From our organization’s inception, translating the website into Spanish has been a top priority to improve access to legal information and community resources. In 2022, Ohio Legal Help reached a milestone as we launched the Spanish-language version of the website with over 203,000 words translated through a generous grant from the Ohio State Bar Foundation. The site offers information on core issues including housing, family law, consumer protection, public benefits, immigration, domestic violence and sealing of criminal records.

Nearly 25 percent of Ohio’s Spanish-speaking households – about 62,000 people – live below 100 percent of the federal poverty level. With the Spanish-language version of Ohio Legal Help, we can provide increased access to the civil justice system for Spanish-speaking Ohioans.

To further reach Spanish-speaking users, we developed a relationship with La Mega Media, the largest Hispanic media platform spanning the state of Ohio and reaching into Pittsburgh and Northern Kentucky. La Mega ran Ohio Legal Help public service announcements in Spanish and helped us reach their 300,000 radio listeners.

Our work to expand our content and self-help tools to a broader audience did not stop there. Through a partnership with the Ohio Youth Advisory Board, we also launched a youth and foster law content module this past year. The Ohio Youth Advisory Board is a statewide organization of young people (aged 14-24) who have experienced foster care and acts as the voice that influences policies and practices that affect all youth who have or will experience out-of-home care.

Thanks to their expertise, foster youth can come to Ohio Legal Help to see what legal rights they have and learn about programs that may be able to help them navigate different challenges. In order to meet foster youth where they are with technology, it was important that the content and self-help tools be mobile-first. Incorporating fairness into design can transform lives.