A new report has found that in 2019 and 2020, for every one dollar invested in Michigan’s civil legal aid services, they delivered nearly seven dollars in financial benefits.

That includes savings in law enforcement and court systems as well as reductions in community medical care expenses.

WKAR’s Sophia Saliby spoke with Angela Tripp, the vice chair of the state’s Justice for All Commissionwhich issued the report.

Interview Highlights

On why this report was created

On the return of investment for offering civil legal aid

On how the report will impact the state of legal aid services in Michigan

Interview Transcript

Sophia Saliby: A new report has found that in 2019 and 2020, for every one dollar invested in Michigan’s civil legal aid services, they delivered nearly seven dollars in financial benefits.

That includes savings in law enforcement and court systems as well as reductions in community medical care expenses.

Angela Tripp is the vice chair of the state’s Justice for All Commission, which issued the report. She joins me now. Thanks for being here.

Angela Tripp: Thank you so much for having me. Sophia.

Cross: I’d like to start by asking you about what legal aid services are in the context of this report?

Tripp: Civil legal aid services are services provided by Michigan attorneys free of charge to low-income Michiganians. And these types of services, because they’re different from criminal in the civil context, these are cases like evictions or family law matters or unemployment appeals or cases like that.

Cases on the on the civil end of things, which have a huge impact on people’s lives, because they, you know, either impact their their family or their ability to access public benefits or housing.

Cross: Can you talk about why the commission worked on this report and put it out?

Tripp: The commission’s main goal is to increase access to justice, and one way to do that is through increasing the availability of civil legal aid services. Unlike the criminal context, where everyone is entitled to an attorney even if they can’t afford one, there is no such guarantee on the civil side.

And so civil legal aid is kind of the only option for people with civil legal needs to get legal help if they can’t afford to hire their own attorney. One of the Justice For All Commission’s goals is to increase funding for civil legal aid, you know, the more funding these programs have, the more people they can help, the more needs they can meet.

And we thought one thing that could help us attract additional funding was to show the huge impact that this work has, which, you know, should inspire state governments, private organizations, federal funders to contribute more, more of their funding to these efforts.

Cross: My next question was what did the results of this report tell you about the effectiveness of legal aid services kind of as a point to what you were just saying?

Tripp: The great framework to look at the impact of civil legal services, as a former legal aid attorney myself, you know, we can always see the immediate impact on the person involved in the legal aid cases. And that’s important and impactful, but it only gets you so far when you’re asking people for funding.

So to be able to say that, you know, for every dollar you give a civil legal aid program, we deliver $6.69 in immediate and long term consequential financial benefits, really puts that in a framework that a lot more people understand and appreciate. And so, it’s not just this mother and her three children who get to retain housing because, you know, that’s a priceless benefit.

You can’t really put a price tag on that, except that you can put a price tag on what that saves in other areas in terms of money saved in sheltering that family and access to emergency public benefits. And you know, the costs of the changing schools for those children, what that costs the system.

So, it’s a way of looking not only at the impact on the individual, but on the savings to the social safety net by prohibiting, you know, bad consequences from civil legal problems.

Cross: What was the most surprising thing to you about the findings?

Tripp: So, the long term consequential financial benefits were surprising to me in that I hadn’t really thought about them. I mean, we always think about the immediate benefits, like, you know, the immediate cost of housing a homeless family in a hotel, for example.

But the long term consequential financial benefits such as, you know, the impact on, you know, that family’s ability to continue working and engaging in the marketplace and in getting a better job and earning more money and the long term impact on that family and then in turn, that has on society as a whole.

It was surprising to me because I, you know, had just never thought about those long term consequences and was delighted to learn how impactful they are.

Cross: How will this report impact future policy decisions?

Tripp: In some ways, you know, it may help legal aid programs with setting of their priorities. You know, it’s not legal aid’s mission to save the social safety net resources, but in terms of looking at the immediate and long term financial benefits to the individual clients that we serve, it may help legal aid organizations prioritize what case types to focus on .

I mean, every legal aid program, you know, has more people needing their help than they can possibly provide assistance to, and so has to make, you know, has to set out priorities, you know, what types of cases to focus on . And I think this information can also help that.

But I think most importantly, it will help the Justice For All Commission to bring additional funding to legal services programs and those providing these important services because we can show what an important and critical part of the civil justice system these resources are, and hopefully get more investment from the state legislature and other funders.

Cross: Angela Tripp is the vice chair of the state’s Justice for All Commission. Thank you for joining me.

Tripp: Thank you so much.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and conciseness.