Heating and other utility costs are going up. The Food Stamp Program
has increased the Standard Utility Allowance it uses to compute Food Stamp
eligibility and amount. More people should be eligible for Food Stamps and
many who get Food Stamps should be getting more. We have updated our Food
Stamp Estimators so you can check whether you would be eligible now, or
whether you should be getting a higher amount.
The I-CAN electronic income
tax filing program is free and easy to use. It has been updated for this year.
Many people who are eligible
don't get the Earned Income Tax Credit, and this year many people who don't usually
file income tax returns might be eligible for a
"Stimulus Refund". Our Free Tax Filing page links
to the I-CAN program and other places you can get free tax help.
If you are a homeowner be sure to check out our Foreclosure
Prevention Toolkit. There are tools that can help if you are having trouble keeping
up with your mortgage payments, if you are receiving notices from your loan
servicer, or even if you are already facing foreclosure.
Legal Aid Around the World is our page of links
to organizations and information about legal aid in other countries. We have just
added links to the National Legal Aid website of China which will be the key
platform of all Legal Aid Centers in China. It is supported by the Canada-China
Legal Aid and Community Legal Services Project.
We now have links to 165 legal aid sites in 59 countries. If you know of one
we are missing, please use the feedback link at the bottom of the page and let us
know. Thanks.
Pine Tree Legal Assistance is forty years old (but still feeling pretty young
and vigorous). Professor David Hall, former Dean of the Northeastern University
School of Law and member of the Legal Services Corporation Board of Directors,
spoke to us at our annual retreat honoring our anniversary. You can read his
inspirational
remarks in the "About Pine Tree" section of our website.
The newest issue of Wabanaki Legal News,
Pine Tree's newsletter for the Maine tribes, is now available on line. It has a
whole new look, and has a feature that allows you to request legal news updates
to be sent to you by email as they become available. The new look and functionality
for Wabanaki Legal News was put together by Pine Tree attorney Rachelle Parise and
her husband David Mallon.
Tax time is just around the corner. We have updated our tax information in Tax Tips for 2008. Lots of money flows at tax
time, and everyone wants a piece of it. Be smart and keep your hard-earned refund. We
have some simple tips for how to hold onto your money. We have also added a list of
106 sites in Maine that provide
free tax preparation help to low-income and elderly Maine residents.
Every October the Department of Health and Human Services updates the eligibility
guidelines for food stamps. A few more people should be eligible for Food
Stamps based on the new guidelines. We have also updated our
food
stamp estimators These estimators can help people see if they might be eligible
for food stamps and how much they might be able to get. While we were at it, we
made quite a few improvements in how the estimators work. If you have any problems
using them, though, please let us know either through the feedback link at the
bottom of this page or the one at the end of the estimator interview.
Our major employment law legal education brochure,
"If You Lose Your Job", has been completely updated and made easier to use.
The Employment Law section of our legal help library has lots of other good information
from Pine Tree, the Department of Labor, the University of Maine, and many
other sources.
We have added a new version of the Financial Statement (FM-043) in our
interactive
forms section. At the recent Family Law Institute we got some good ideas for
improvement from some of the family law attorneys who use the form a lot. The only
way we can keep making the services provided on this website better is by feedback
and suggestions from the people who use them. There is a feedback link at
the bottom of every page.
Around the Web in 80 Minutes is where we keep our
links to valuable research resources for legal issues affecting low-income people.
It is used by our staff, by private attorneys, and by some of our clients trying to
learn more about legal issues affecting them. We have just updated the page, fixing
or removing bad links and adding some new resources. If you know of a good legal
research website we should include please let us know with the feedback link at
the bottom of the page.
The Protection From Abuse and Protection From Harassment court forms are now
available on our website translated into six
different languages -- French,
Spanish,
Khmer,
Vietnamese,
Arabic, and
Somali. These are available as part of a project sponsored by the Violence
Intervention Partnership of Cumberland County.
Although, for now, English forms will have to be used for filing in court, we
hope these translated forms will help our non-English speaking clients, and
people working with them, better understand the meaning of the English forms and
what is required to fill them out or comply with them.
Our interactive
forms now include the "Supplemental Child Support Worksheet," form FM-040A, for
situations where both parents provide substantially equal care for the children. This
is a complex form which must be filled out with FM-040, which is attached to it.
We urge our low-income clients to be careful before entering into a formal
arrangement like this. It could prevent either party from ever receiving TANF benefits
if they are needed.
We have also updated form
CR-033, the Assisgned Counsel Voucher which we have
made available on the site at the request of attorneys who do assigned counsel
work. An attorney noticed that it was out of date and sent us an email. We contacted
the Court and were told they wanted to make another update because the rules had
recently changed. The new update is now available. It is only through feedback
from people who use our website that we are able to keep things up to date. Thanks.
We keep adding to our links pages whenever we learn of relevant sites. The links to Legal Services Sites now lists
the websites of more than 230 organizations around the country providing free legal services
to low-income, elderly, disabled and disadvantaged people. We're sure we've missed
a few, so use the feedback button at the bottom of this page to let us know if you
know a site that should be included.
When we started in May of 1996 there were two organizations with websites - Pine
Tree Legal Assistance and Atlanta Legal Aid. A look at the Wayback Machine archive
for Pine Tree's site for
December 1996 shows ten legal aid organizations with websites. We've come a long
way since then, both in terms of number of sites and qualitiy of information and
on-line help.
New in the Public Benefits section of our Legal Help library is Pine Tree's Benefits Checklist.
It is not easy to balance a household budget when you have a low income. But you
can supplement your income by claiming all of the benefits and supports you have
the right to claim. Here is a checklist. Make sure you are not leaving money on
the table!
The Housing section of the Legal Help library has a new pamphlet called, Don't Borrow Trouble
about mortgages, home equity loans and refinancing. It has some good tips on
how to avoid predatory lending - unfair practices in financing and lending.
As part of our
Fair Housing work we have added short pdf fliers in the
Farsi and
Dinka languages.
We are committed to providing the best possible information and assistance
to our clients regardless of the language they speak. We try to do that on our
website, in our offices and in court.
Our Consumer Law section of the
Library has two important new articles on bankruptcy law: Bankruptcy: Is it the
right choice for you? and Filing for Chapter
7 Bankruptcy in Maine: Getting Started.
The new bankruptcy law makes it harder for a very low-income person to find a lawyer
to help with a bankruptcy case. We have posted this information to help people figure
out what to do.
Our Consumer Law section has an important new article on
Predatory Lending.
On our sister websites, Legal Services for the Elderly has posted a large amount
of iformation on Medicare Part D, a
miniature website in its own right, with sections for both consumers of medicare
services and providers. Maine Equal Justice has a shorter piece, which is being
continuously updated, for so-called dual eligibles,
who are eligible for both medicare and medicaid.
In the
Education Law section of our client education Legal Help materials we have posted
seven new and updated brochures on various aspects of education law, including Maine
Truancy Laws, What School District do I go to?, Sepcial Ed: A New Language, and
others.
Most of these documents sit on our sister website
KIDS Legal Aid, but the internet allows us to share important information wherever we
think our clients will find it useful. Most of the legal services websites in Maine
share information in one way or another.
We have added another news page to our News
section. We now have "news boxes" on our new
Heating Assistance News page as well as our home
page and two on our Health Law
News page - Dirigo News and Prescription Law News. We also maintain specialized
"news boxes" for KIDS Legal Aid, Maine Legal Services for the Elderly, and
HelpMeLaw, our sister websites.
The courts have made a lot of changes to their family
law forms. They have changed the numbering system so that the forms are now
numbered with an "FM" instead of a "CV." For example the Child Support Worksheet
is now FM-040, not CV-040. They have also changed all references to Case Management
Officers to "Magistrate," their new title in the statutes. Clerks will still
accept the old forms but if you have copies of the old forms laying around, they
should be replaced.
We have added to many of our
interactive forms the ability to erase any information you put into the form.
None of that information is ever saved on the Pine Tree web site, and we never
see any of it. However, on some computers the form data is "cached" and might
appear in the form the next time someone uses that form on the same computer.
Resetting the form is a good idea if you are on a public computer.
We have also added information about
CutePDF, software
that allows a user to save the interactive forms with the information they have
typed into the form. This allows people to save partially completed forms and
finish them later. If you are concerned about privacy or domestic violence, though,
you should be cautious about where and how you save your information.
The Legal Guide for Immigrants
to Maine is a sixteen chapter handbook for non-citizens. It provides basic
information about the laws of Maine and the United States affecting immigrants.
The on-line version of the handbook, available in
Spanish and
English was designed by Tim
Brooks of Integra Strategic
Technologies. We think he did a pretty good job.
Annie Poole, the wonderful Brooksville artist who painted the two watercolors that
are in our page banners, has designed a new set of library "icons" for the website.
The old ones were a hodgepodge of images we found in various places. The new
icons are a set, with a consistent look. We find that the icons help many people
get a visual idea of the kind of information they can find in each section of the
library. Check them out in our Legal Help
Library
Our old food stamp estimators were cumbersome six page interactive pdf forms. We
were pretty proud of them but the New
Food Stamp Estimators are far easier to use and produce a short one page printout
with all the needed information.
Our KIDS Legal Aid web site now includes
the the excellent ABA video of former Pine Tree attorney Toby Hollander and his pro
bono work as a guardian ad litem for Maine's children. Look for it in the left hand
navigation bar (You will need Real Player to view it). The video was prepared by the ABA
in conjunction with Toby's receipt of the Ann Leichty Child Custody Pro Bono Award
at the ABA annual meeting. Hopefully it will inspire more attorneys to undertake
this work on bahalf of children, not just in Maine, but nationally.
Every October eligibility for food stamps changes to account for increases in the
cost of food.
We have updated our food stamp
calculators to include this year's changes. You can use these calculators to find out
whether you should be eligible for food stamps under the Maine regulations, and how much your
benefit amount should be. There are two calculators, one for households that include
an elderly or a disabled person, and one for households that do not.
These calculators are .pdf documents and are pretty easy to use if you follow step by
step. We are working on a couple of projects to build fancier calculators, but
it will be a while before those are ready.
KIDS Legal Aid of Maine is a new project of Pine Tree Legal Assistance that has
its own section of the Pine Tree web site:
http://www.kidslegalaid.org. KIDS Legal Aid and the Barbara Bush Children's
Hospital have just published a "Resource Code Card" for medical professionals as
part of the Family Advocacy Program, a joint project of KIDS Legal Aid and the
Hospital. The card is designed to be a resource to help medical professionals
identify environmental and social problems affecting childrens health and to
provide resources to address those problems. We have published
an extended web version
of the recource code card.
This should be a good resource for nonmedical professionals, as well.
There are two new family law forms in our forms pages.
These are forms required by the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement
Act (UCCJA). One of the new forms is a Verified Application for Issuance of a Warrant
(FM-181) ordering law enforcement officials to enforce an out of state custody order.
The other new form is a Petition for Expedited Enforcement of a Child Custody
Determination (FM-008).
We have also posted the updated version of the Child Support Order form (FM-132).
That updated form, and the new ones, represent a new numbering system for the court
forms. All of the family law forms are having their numbers changed from CV forms to
FM forms. We will try to make the changes as soon as the court does. It shouldn't
matter, however, if you file a form labled CV instead of FM. It's what's inside the
form that counts.
Many thanks to Lynda Haskell of the Judicial Branch for all her help in keeping our
forms library up to date.
One of our newest legal information brochures is
Child Abuse and Neglect "Substantiation" in Maine. The Department of Human Services
has recently agreed to notify people whose names are put on the "substantiation list,"
and give them a right to challenge that listing. The brochure has the steps a person
can take to protect themself if DHS notifies them that their name has been added to
the "substantiation" list.
We often add new articles to our library of legal information. You can find others
in our Legal Help library or on the
HelpMeLaw web site.
The Court instruction sheets that we post on our
court forms pages give a good short description of how to use the forms in
the court process. There are instruction sheets for "Divorce with Children,"
"Divorce without Children," "Parental Rights and Responsibilities Cases," "Case
Management Conferences," "Motions to Enforce," "Motions to Modify," and "Motions
for Contempt." Most of these have been recently updated, and the new instruction
sheets are available.
Our forms pages now include the new versions
of the Child Support Worksheet, the new Supplemental Child Support Worksheet for
use in cases where the parents each provide substantially equal care for the children,
and the revised Complaint for Protection From Abuse form. Clients whose families
get TANF benefits, or who might need them in the future, should be careful about
agreeing to "substantially equal care" arrangements. They can mean that the family
could not get TANF benefits.
We have also posted the Abstract of Divorce Decree form.
Many thanks to Lynda Haskell of the Judicial Branch for all her help in keeping our
forms library up to date.
The Native American sections of our website get a lot of visitors. We publish
on-line versions of
Wabanaki Legal News, our newsletter for our Native American clients in Maine,
and Quinnehtukqut
Legal News our newsletter for Native American clients in Connecticut. One of our
most frequently used client education articles is the one on the Indian Child Welfare Act.
Our newest addition to this material is a comprehensive article on
Border Crossing Rights for
Aboriginal People, prepared by the American Indian Law Alliance. This supplements our
shorter article on the Jay
Treaty.
One of the beauties of the internet is that you can link to information anywhere.
One of our newest projects can't really be found on the Pine Tree Legal
Assistance website at all. Because the Zope-based PTLA site is more powerful and
easier to work with, we have built the Volunteer Lawyers Project's new
Guardian Ad Litem Best Practices Manual on the
Pine Tree website. We have tried to build it, though, so that it has the look
and feel of an integrated part of the VLP site. Although it sits on the Pine Tree
site, it uses the same colors and graphics as the VLP, and the navigation
scheme takes you to the Pine Tree site and back to the VLP pretty much seamlessly.
The News section
of our website gets a lot of traffic. Health
Law News is our most recently added news page. Many news sources are
reporting that Maine is on the leading edge of health care reform in the U.S.
In Health Law News, we'll try to keep you up to date with news about health
care proposals in the Maine and national legislatures, health law cases in
the courts, and other important health law issues. We have two news boxes on
the page, one for news about the many prescription drug programs in Maine,
and one for news about the Dirigo Health Plan being considered by the legislature.
We have added three new languages - French, Croatian,
Arabic - to the contact information available from our home page,
bringing the total to ten. We're still working on a few more. The Amharic "Welcome Page" is a .pdf file because there are no standardized "Unicode"
fonts for the Amharic language. We find that presenting information
over the internet with different language fonts is very tricky. Even the Unicode fonts won't work with some
web browsers. If you have any tips on how we can do a better job, we welcome advice.
Many of our most frequently used client education materials are available in Spanish
and Russian. We are working on increasing those, as well.
For presenting our materials on the internet we try to use, whenever possible, the
the Unicode standard. We believe that standard
will make our information available to the greatest number of people using different
web browsers and computers with different fonts. We are still learning about doing this,
and welcome comments and ideas from others.
For clients who cannot speak English, we use
LanguageLine Services for translation. Ususally within a very short time we can
arrange telephone translation for a client who needs to speak with us in these languages
or others.
The I-CAN project, in which Pine Tree is a partner,
enables our clients who are eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit to prepare their
tax returns on line and file them electronically. Clients who are able to take advantage
of electronic filing should get their tax refunds much sooner than if they send in
a paper return.
We have also updated File Smart, our Tax Tips
page, and much of the other information from our
Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic. We particularly urge our clients to take advantage of
the Earned Income Credit. This is a benefit that too
few eligible clients take advantage of, and which could put money in their pockets.
We
have added a page describing our
videoconferencing facilities around the state, which we now make available for rent
to other non-profit organizations and private attorneys.
