[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.
